I have seen the agent's inventory sync go very slow. I had an agent with about 180 or so resources. I started the agent clean (nothing in /data directory; inventory.dat was gone). It took about 10 minutes for the agent to complete the sync - all that time, the agent showed red in the UI so this will be confusing to people thinking they started the agent but its not turning green within a minute or two from startup. We need to optimize the inventory sync so it goes faster.
this was fixed for 1.2 release. the old algorithm used to be O(N) where N was the number of nodes in the tree for that platform. today's inventory sync is O(D) where D is the depth of the resource tree. also, instead of creating and delivering measurement schedules one resource at a time, they are also bulk inserted. alert template creation has been moved fully back to the server side.
This bug was previously known as http://jira.rhq-project.org/browse/RHQ-1067