Item distribution / nextcheck

[matthewh]

Hello,
I have been trying to understand if Zabbix does any distribution / balancing of items entered into the system.
The reason being I am starting a Zabbix system which will have many items collected with very short delays and want to understand the impact of this.

So far I have found one slightly old post from Alexei

Thanks for the ideas. I'm going to implement the following schema:

1. When an item is created nextcheck (next time to refresh) will be set to itemid%3600
2. Next refresh time will be calculated as, simplified, (itemid%3600+N*delay)


This does not seem to have been implemented.
Having a look at the source code of "src/libs/zbxcommon/misc.c"
in particular the "calculate_item_nextcheck" function,
If I understand it correctly it calculates the nextcheck as follows;

i=delay*(int)(now/(time_t)delay)+(int)(itemid % (zbx_uint64_t)delay);
while(i<=now)  i+=delay; 

for example if now is 1206087072 and itemid is 19871 and delay is 10;
1206087072 + 19871 % 10 = 1206087082
But looking at the debug log I got;

In calculate_item_nextcheck (19871,10,,1206087072)
End calculate_item_nextcheck (result:1206087081)

Effectively leaving any time based distribution of item collection dependant on when the item is inserted.

Is my understanding correct in this?
If so would it not be better to implement some form of time based distribution of item collection (if so I would look at implementing this).

Cheers,
Matthew