Until now I have been running on a PC and it works fine. Monitoring 500 routerboards, SNMP probes for system name, ROS version, firmware, uptime, CPU/memory/disk, along with ping.

Today I installed ROS 6.37.3 with Dude server on a hEX with 16 GB MicroSD. Sandisk HC I.
Uninstalled old Dude client and installed 6.37.
Restored my DB backup (about 80 MB) to the server and got the server running after a lot of vacuuming (LOL), but the client is very slow at connecting and it is barely capable of updating anything on the panels.
hEX CPU continiously stays at 30-40%, one of the cores are at 100% all the time.
Tried to upgrade to 6.38rc37 just to see whether it makes any difference, but the Dude Server is still slow, so slow it is unusable.
(Nice though with Dude cfg in Winbox)

Can this problem be all about slow SD performance (from what I've read the hEX cannot utilize the fastest cards) or is 500 boards/ about 2000-2500 SNMP probes simply way too much for the hEX?

Any of you guys tried the Dude on hEX for a network of a similar size?

Recommendations for alternative RB hardware?
Will the RB3011 keep up, or will I have to move to CCR-1009?

It would be good to check what exactly is hogging that core. You can generate supout file on device and send it to support@mikrotik.com and we will take a look at it.