exec action performance

[Bill Durant]

Hello:

How does Monit perform the exec action internally?

I am finding that running too many "exec" actions during a polling
interval causes a high system CPU usage spike.

I am able to duplicate the CPU spike by having Monit run 20 exec actions
at every 30 second polling interval even it runs a program that does
nothing such as the following:

$ cat foo.c
main(){}

$ cc -c foo foo.c

So when Monit runs "foo" 20 times via the exec action, at every polling
interval, the system CPU usage jumps to 90%+.

And staggering the exec's with a 'run every N cycles' or 'run every cron
xxx' appears to not guarantee that the number of exec's run on every
polling cycle will be minimized.

Is the exec action heavy weight by design?

Thanks,

Bill