Polling performance results FYI

[boots]

Hi all,

I have just recently implemented cactid with some great results. I thought I woud share them with you..

System Details
P4 3.2Ghz VMWare GSX Host running 4 VMWare Images
Image running Cacti is a Win 2003 Server with 512M RAM Allocated
PHP 4.3.9
MySQL 3.23.49
Cacti 0.8.6b with IIS (pre release 0.8.6c patches)
Cactid 0.8.6c (no need to use cygwin and compile)
I am polling 66 hosts, of which some hosts have upto 12 objects polled per device. All templates and scheduled task have been changed to 60 second intervals. This server is also running Crannog Monitor Netflow Collection & Reporting server on the same MySQL database as Cacti and Kiwi Syslog Daemon for around 120 devices.

Results
Running poller took 155 seconds using 4 processes, 66 hosts, 17 hosts per process. Obviously a bit slower than the 60 seconds I wanted Using this resulted in 100% CPU 80% of the time

Implemented cactid over various thread options;

* 4 Processes, 1 thread - avg 81 seconds
* 4 Processes, 2 thread - avg 68 seconds
* 4 Processes, 4 thread - avg 51 seconds

Its a bit hard to baseline accurately because this is a shared server running multiple apps, and the MySQL database is also shared between different apps, however you can see the performance improvement. Running with 4 threads, my CPU utilisation has now dropped to around 10% on average and only upto 100% during the polling process

Now to work on PHP to reduce 100% CPU usage when using the Cacti Interface!!!!

Cheers

Boots

[willie]

Boots,

Just to give you an example of what cactid can do. I am running 955 unique hosts with a poller cache of 7100 oids. I am using IIS 6 on a DL580 with 2 gig of ram and cacti 0.86b (with all of the patches).
My polling time is 130 secs. I cannot complete the poll in the 5 minute interval if I use the cmd method instead of cactid.

I have cactid set up to use 1 process and 25 threads. Once the multi-poller version is ready, I will move cactid off of my web server.

Regards,

Willie

[Brashquido]

Is tehre anywhere I can read about this multi-poller?

[rony]

Multi poller support will be available in 0.8.7.

It will allow you to run pollers on remote hosts and have the results processed by cacti on the webserver.

[fmangeant]

Hi Tony

what software will be required on each poller ? And what protocol will be used between the pollers ?

Thanks in advance.

[rony]

Currently as it stands today, PHP in Command Line Interface (minimum), NET-SNMP, and mySQL client.

Intercommunication will be handled using the database (mysql). We had thought of other things, but the database is already running and was a good lowest common denominator to use.