Hi Eric
this won't help you much, but I'm monitoring 1733 hosts with Hobbit, on a dual Xeon 3.2 GHz with 4 Gb running an up-to-date Gentoo Linux. Hobbit takes between 15 and 30 seconds to ping 1632 hosts; sudo is used to run fping :
TIME SPENT Event Starttime
Duration PING test completed (1632 hosts) 1146122348.804056
19.808170Running fping by hand gives this :
fping -i5 -b12 -f /tmp/ips.txt -r1 -t250 -B2 -q -s
[...] 30.999 sec (elapsed real time)
Lowering the -i, -r, -t values doesn't give anything...
The funny thing is that Hobbit runs sudo with -Ae, which is way slower when I run it by hand...
Weird. Using the -Ae flag doesn't make a difference in time for me, nor does using sudo (this is testing it by hand, not from within hobbit). Still, it seems like you are doing better than we are. I wonder if this is a Fedora-specific peculiararity? I'll try installing fping on my wimpy Arch Linux desktop box and seeing if I can glean anything conclusive (although the difference in hardware is going to make this difficult).
Thanks for sharing! -Eric