Spine and Poller run times (is this good or bad?)

Hi all,

I am wondering if there is something wrong with my Cacti installation
or if this is normal:

>From the logs, when the poller runs (I am using spine, I have compiled
the latest version) everything looks good to me;

4554:08/21/2013 04:20:04 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 1.0897 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 3
5391:08/21/2013 04:20:05 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 1.2657 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 6
5579:08/21/2013 04:20:05 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 1.3529 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 7
5610:08/21/2013 04:20:05 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 1.4433 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 8
7586:08/21/2013 04:20:06 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 3.1098 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 29
8435:08/21/2013 04:20:08 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 4.6443 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 35
9483:08/21/2013 04:20:12 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 9.0247 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 29
10015:08/21/2013 04:20:15 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 11.6772 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 51
10017:08/21/2013 04:20:23 PM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:321.6814
Method:spine Processes:10 Threads:2 Hosts:188 HostsPerProcess:19
DataSources:9617 RRDsProcessed:4378
10022:08/21/2013 04:20:33 PM - SPINE: Poller[0] Time: 29.3343 s,
Threads: 2, Hosts: 28

So that's 188 hosts polled and 4.3k~ RRDs were updated in about 30
seconds. That seems very good to me in fact!

However looking here: /utilities.php?action=view_tech I can see that
the run time is very long;
Last Run Statistics    Time:388.4284 Method:spine......

Like most people I am polling every 5 minutes. Watching the 5 minute
polls running on the CLI via htop and top, I can see that my spine
processes start up, the CPU on the server shoots up to 100% for about
30 seconds, then all the spine processes exit, and the server drops to
%1~ usage and all is quiet. Yet I can always see that the poller.php
is still running until a little while into the next 5 minute poll
event. Why is the PHP script still running, after spine has finished?
Is the server still busy "processing" the data spine received i.e.
putting it into RRDs, updating MySQL etc? There is disk I/O after
spine has exited.

I am running Cacti 0.8.7g but tonight I plan to upgrade to 0.8.8b.

Many thanks,
James,

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