Optimizing Nessus

I'm running a program that scans the networks and my school and identifies
and notifies any users whose machine is missing critical security patches.
The way the program is designed it sets up and then closes a connection for
each IP that it is going to scan. (It uses Net::Nessus::ScanLite for this.)
On each machine it scans for 6 plugins plus dependencies. I think the
overall list of plugins after dependencies is about 20-30. The scan goes
over a /21 range. I know that I could get some optimizations by re-writing
the program to do some of the scanning in parallel and not reconnecting for
each ip, but at the moment I don't have the time or knowledge to re-write
the program. Is there anything else I can tweak, either server side or
client side? That will make the scan run faster? (It currently takes about 8
hours to go through that /21 range. Considering that many students only turn
their computers on when they are using them I'm worried that I will be more
likely to miss them if I only get about 3 chances a day.)

The boxes that the Nessus servers are running on are PIII's (733 and 866)
with either 256 or 512 of memory. If it would make a difference I can
probably bump that memory up, but I would like some advice on if it will
make much of a difference.


----------------
Thanks
Jefferson Cowart
Jeff@cowart.net  

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