spine fast, poller.php slow?EDIT:waiting for rrdtool? boost?

[cactusdummy]

Hi.

I am new to Cacti an I am using it with spine under Windows 2003.
Here are usual stats at the moment:
SYSTEM STATS: Time:208.7353 Method:spine Processes:8 Threads:8 Hosts:6 HostsPerProcess:1 DataSources:5773 RRDsProcessed:1928

Since the search is not working very well at the moment my questions are:

When I look at the scheduled poll or a manually triggered poll the eight spine process windows appear and are gone in about 20 seconds.
The rest of the time only the php window stays open and after at least 200 seconds it shows me the output above.
Can I optimize anything to speed up the php process?
Is this the usual behavior of a poll?

During the time of the spine processes cpu load is at 100%, after spine cpu load is almost zero.
Network load is never even high.

cacti: 0.8.7b
spine: 0.8.7a ? (the newest from cacti.net)
php: 5.2.8 with 256mb in php.ini, php.exe process uses not more than 31mb

I do not think configuring spine processes will help anymore. spine is imho working fast and well.

EDIT:
Could this relate to the database underneath?

EDIT2:
It looks like everything is waiting for rrdtool to process the data.
Can someone confirm this?
I think it's time to look at the boost plugin?! boost v2.1 just around the corner... .

any ideas?

Many thanks in advance

----------------------------------------------------
Hosts Polled: 6
Average Time to Poll: 3 Minutes 20 sec
Concurrent Processes: 8
Threads: 8
Processor Speed: Intel Xeon 2.4Ghz
Number of Processors: 1

[cactusdummy]

EDIT:
Could this relate to the database underneath?

Hmm. No, I think this isn't it.
Mysqladmin Serverstatus looks like the database is more or less bored, except for the 20 seconds when spine is running... .

Any other ideas anyone?

By the time I added another host with multiple datasources an by now I am getting close to the 300 sec poller time:
Time:281.3876 Method:spine Processes:8 Threads:8 Hosts:7 HostsPerProcess:1 DataSources:8077 RRDsProcessed:2696

So as you can see I need some help on this because there will be many more hosts like this to come.

help pls!

[cactusdummy]

EDIT2:
It looks like everything is waiting for rrdtool to process the data.
Can someone confirm this?
I think it's time to look at the boost plugin?! boost v2.1 just around the corner... .

Looks like this could be it.
But to be honest. I am a little afraid of testing the boost plugin. It is probably quite stable but it doesn't look very trivial if something goes wrong and you have to debug. At least for my skill level.

Anyone with experience?

still help appreciated!

many thanks in advance!

[khufure]

Hi.

I am new to Cacti an I am using it with spine under Windows 2003.
Here are usual stats at the moment:
SYSTEM STATS: Time:208.7353 Method:spine Processes:8 Threads:8 Hosts:6 HostsPerProcess:1 DataSources:5773 RRDsProcessed:1928

----------------------------------------------------
Hosts Polled: 6
Average Time to Poll: 3 Minutes 20 sec
Concurrent Processes: 8
Threads: 8
Processor Speed: Intel Xeon 2.4Ghz
Number of Processors: 1

If you only have 1 Xeon 2.4ghz processor -- try using 1 or 2 processes and increasing threads to 20-40. (Expirement to see which is better for you). With spine, processes should be 1-1.5x your processor or 'core' count.

I wouldn't use boost with a system under 15,000 RRDs. Boost adds a lot of complexity and is a fantastic new plug-in because of its ability to cache the RRD (datafile) updates. In other words, when your limit is disk writing.

More concretely : boost will write updates for each rrd file once per X configurable interval (e.g. every few hours) instead of once every 5 minutes. It does this by caching the data into a mysql table which is usually a MEMORY table isntead of disk. If you don't need this great write-to-disk optimization you are better off not using it. This is especially true if you are just getting started in Cacti.