Nessus Agent Hardware Requirements

Tenable Nessus Agents are lightweight and only minimal system resources. Generally, a Tenable Nessus Agent uses 40 MB of RAM (all pageable). A Tenable Nessus Agent uses almost no CPU while idle, but is designed to use up to 100% of CPU when available during jobs.

The following table outlines the minimum recommended hardware for operating a Tenable Nessus Agent. You can install Tenable Nessus Agents on a virtual machine that meets the same requirements specified.

Hardware	Minimum Requirement
Processor	1 Dual-core CPU
Processor Speed	> 1 GHz
RAM	> 1 GB
Disk Space	Agents 7.7.x and earlier: > 1 GB, not including space used by the host operating system Agents 8.0.x and later: > 3 GB, not including space used by the host operating system Agents 10.0.x and later: > 2 GB, not including space used by the host operating system The agent may require more space during certain processes, such as a plugins-code.db defragmentation operation.
Disk Speed	15-50 IOPS