Yes, use a customized notify_email maybe the best solution. Actually, we don't have so many servers now and just want to test the maxium services nagios can hold. The result is not good. Reloading is not a problem for some systems which doesn't change a lot. But in our situation, if we have 5000 servers, we may have to reload nagios many times in a day. Since every day, we have many new customers join or left. Also, customers may want to add new services, change the notification email address and so on...... So how fast nagios can load the new configurations will be an issue in such situation. And that's why I am tying to let it run faster. I can find a way to solve this problem and limit the reload times. But I feel that the way nagios handle the configuration data is not good enough. It should read the configuration files from some kind of databases in real time, if don't want to use sql, then cdb format like tinydns. So nagios administrator will just prepare some easy to understand configuration files, and use a program convert it to nagios's db format. Then, nagios will check the new configuration from time to time. If detected a change, then use the new configuration data... something like that.... So the nagios can be always up and don't need to reload/restart at all. Actually, now nagios generate an object.cache files when it start/reload, but it's so in plain text format. The retention.dat is also in plain text format..... Why not use some kind of DB format so can create/read/update it faster and easier? just my 2 cents, thanks Billow