I ran into a similar issue with 3750s in a stack of 7, which took similar times to poll. What I found my issues were:

1) Make sure you’re using poller-wrapper and not just a series of poller.h in your cron.

2) In your config.php, check your configuration options (http://observium.org/wiki/Configuration_Options#Poller_and_Discovery_Modules) for ports. Try to remove all of them and see if that improves your performance, and start adding them back one by one.

From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Bastiaan Topper
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 4:58 AM
To: observium@observium.org
Subject: [Observium] slow polling of Cisco 4500 VSS switches

Hi all,

We have a very long poll time on some of the devices. We have a few Cisco 4500 switches with a lott of interfaces. For example a Cisco 4506 with 4x 48 ports linecard, the poll time for the device is:

As you can see the poll time changed around 28/29 July. I disabled the device around 31 July, as you can see.

We also have Cisco 4500 VSS setups with several hundreds of interfaces, these devices I disabled for now, because the poller couldn’t keep up with it.

Today I found some time to troubleshoot, and found the above statistics. Beside that a did a poll with debug on. It “hangs” very long on every interface of every device it polls. After looking into that, it seems that it collects all interfaces per metric it polls. I think that is the problem with devices with a big amount of interfaces, because it collects all statistics again for every interface.

How can I fix this? Is this by design/Is this a bug? Or is it something in my setup?

Regards,

Bastiaan Topper

Korton Group BV