[PLUG] SNMP Agent CPU Hog + Timeouts

[Steve Bonds]

PLUGgers:

I just set up SNMP monitoring for some of our older Red Hat Enterprise
2.1 systems using the RedHat-provided ucd-snmp-4.2.5-8.AS21.4.  The
snmpd process chews up a LOT of CPU time immediately after it gets its
first request, so much so that queries time out.  This is despite my
attempt at a really, really basic configuration:

----- snmpd.conf -----
####
# First, map the community name "mycommunity" into a "security name"

#       sec.name  source          community
com2sec notConfigUser  default       mycommunity

####
# Second, map the security name into a group name:

#       groupName      securityModel securityName
group   notConfigGroup v1           notConfigUser

####
# Third, create a view for us to let the group have rights to:

#       name           incl/excl     subtree         mask(optional)
view    systemview     included      system.sysDescr
view    systemview     included      system.sysObjectID
view    systemview     included      system.sysContact
view    systemview     included      system.sysName
view    systemview     included      system.sysLocation
view    systemview     included      system.sysUpTime
view    systemview     included      interfaces.ifTable
view    systemview     included      ip.ipAddrTable

####
# Finally, grant the group read-only access to the systemview view.

#       group          context sec.model sec.level prefix read   write  notif
access  notConfigGroup ""      any       noauth    exact  systemview none none

syslocation Data Center
syscontact UNIX Admins
------

A system call trace of the snmp agent when it's wedged (strace -p
<PID>) shows that it's strobing through /proc and RPM contents of the
host.  There's no access to that data, so there's no need to collect
it.  I may want to enable disk monitoring, so I don't want to use the
snmpd.conf directive "ignoredisk".

So far, both Google and the Net-SNMP website have failed me:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=net-snmp+snmpd+high+cpu
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=net-snmp+snmpd+%2Fproc
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=net-snmp+snmpd+timeout
http://www.net-snmp.org/docs/man/snmpd.conf.html

How can I turn off the time-consuming and CPU-consuming data collections?

  -- Steve