Spine Information

Spine, formerly Cactid, is a poller for Cacti that primarily strives to be as fast as possible. For this reason it is written in native C, makes use of POSIX threads, and is linked directly against the net-snmp library for minmumal SNMP polling overhead. Spine is a replacement for the default cmd.php poller so you must decide if using Spine makes sense for your installation.

Should I Use Spine?

The answer to your question really depends on how large your installation is. The poller you use has to poll data for all of your graphs within a 300 second time window. If you find that cmd.php's runtime approaches or exceeds 300 seconds, you should consider switching to Spine. You should also try increasing the "Maximum Concurrent Poller Processes" setting before totally giving up on cmd.php.

To determine how long cmd.php is taking to execute, run the following command inside of your Cacti directory:

$ php poller.php
08/28/2004 08:42:43 PM - SYSTEM STATS: Time: 2.4707 s, Method: cmd.php, Processes: 1, Threads: N/A, Hosts: 2, Hosts/Process: 2

This example tells us that cmd.php took 2.47 seconds to run using a single process. Since 2.47 is nowhere near the 300 second limit, we should be fine with cmd.php for quite some time.

Sample Benchmarks

We need some real benchmarks that show off Spine's speed! Include the following information if you wish to submit your own benchmark data.

Hosts Polled: XXXX
Average Time to Poll: XXX Minutes
Concurrent Processes: 1 or X
Threads: 1 or X
Processor Speed: XXX Mhz
Number of Processors: 1-8