Device Polling Order

[Snowboarding360]

I am using the cmd.php poller and was wondering if anyone has done anything to change the polling order or has thought about it? The device naming convention that was chosen where I work is based on region of the world (Asia-Pac, Europe, Americas) followed by the city. I am running 10 poller processes, and the problem is that since devices are assigned to the pollers alphabetically, the pollers are given a highly unequal distribution of devices based on response time such that the majority of pollers finish rapidly, then it's stuck with just 2-3 stragglers for devices that are far away with very high latency. It would be nice if Cacti stored the avergage/last polling times for each device and distributed devices to pollers evenly as such.

[gandalf]

... and the problem is that since devices are assigned to the pollers alphabetically, the pollers are given a highly unequal distribution ...

AFAIK, your statement is not correct. cacti assigns an autoincrement number to each host at the time of creation of this host. When cacti's poller runs, it will start cmd.php or cactid.php with a number range that is calculated by the highest host number divided by the number of concurrent pollers.
This may as well lead to unequal distribution in your terms. But AFAIK there's no solution on this
Reinhard

[Snowboarding360]

Thanks for your reply. I thought I had read somewhere on the forums that the polling order was distributed alphabetically, but I could not find the thread again. Is the autoincrement number the unique key assigned to the host? If I find it in the database and change it would it create a problem do you know? I'm not well versed on php enough yet to poke through the code to find how it is done.

[gandalf]

I would recommend not to do this. It is the unique key, but (as expected) used widespread. So you would have to change lots of other tables. Not an easy task ...
Reinhard