When should I use the Spine poller?

When should you upgrade your Cacti poller from cmd.php to Spine? While it is not easy to generalize conditions that constitute a "large" grid environment, there are some rules of thumb which you can follow to decide if you should upgrade to Spine.

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Upgrade to Spine poller if ANY of the following conditions apply to your RTM installation:

One or more graphs is constantly "gapping". That is, periodic gaps appear in your graphs.
Current polling times are more than 250 seconds. In your Cacti log, check SYSTEM STATS: Time:
You frequently get the error "Poller output table not empty" in the Cacti log.
You monitor a large number of devices that are outside of your LSF grid.
You have more than 10,000 graphs for one cluster.

Even if none of the above apply to you, consider upgrading to Spine to improve the general performance of your RTM server.