"The POPEN timed out" what does it mean?

[celestian]

I am running current cacti with cacti-spine-0.8.7g under solaris 10. I am repeatedly seeing the error "10/14/2010 03:36:31 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Host[697] ERROR: The POPEN timed out " for varying hosts. These hosts ALL tend to be sites outside the country, leading me to believe it's a latency issue.

What exactly does popen timed out mean? If I have enough of the errors from sites like this it causes the poll to fail and data holes in trends.

Just looking for ways to resolve this, thanks!

[celestian]

Something else I've found is this in my logs:

Spine did not detect multithreaded device polling

I've set spine to use up to 50 threads. Is this not the same option/configuration? Am I missing something to enable multithreaded polling?

[Christian]

Popen is a php function and is used to open process file pointers. In other words it used to run processes and get the output from them. If the runtime of your scripts exceed the "Script and Script Server Timeout Value", cacti spits out the error message "The popen timed out".

It could be something else, but this is it most likely.

[celestian]

I was able to work around the problem by pushing the script number to 5 and then the timeout value to 30. This seemed to cut the total runtime for the spine process down from pretty close to 300 seconds to about 160-180.