[cacti-user] Slowness with RRDtool graphing w/ Cacti

Hardware:
 	CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (2806.37-MHz 686-class CPU)
 	real memory  = 2146631680 (2047 MB)

Load:
 	CPU:  2.2% user,  0.0% nice,  1.1% system,  0.0% interrupt, 96.6% idle
 	Mem: 162M Active, 1461M Inact, 178M Wired, 96M Cache, 112M Buf, 99M 
Free
 	Swap: 4061M Total, 84K Used, 4061M Free
 	Disks   ad0   ad1                                  183024 wire
 	KB/t    128  0.00                                  186724 act
 	tps       0     0                                 1496468 inact
 	MB/s   0.02  0.00                                   98392 cache
 	%busy     0     0                                   80408 free
                                                    114880 buf

Versions:
         6.4-RELEASE FreeBSD
 	Server version: Apache/2.2.9 (FreeBSD)
 	PHP 5.2.6 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Apr 16 2009
 	Cacti Version 0.8.7g
 	RRDTool versions tried:
 		Currently RRDtool 1.4.5
 		Also tried RRDtool 1.0.49
 		Also tried RRDtool 1.3.1

Summary: Loading of a given page of graphs in Cacti taking minutes to load
   PID USERNAME      THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
53185 www             1 101    0  9292K  6096K RUN    0   0:03 15.79% rrdtool
53186 www             1 101    0  9288K  6092K RUN    0   0:03 15.54% rrdtool
53192 www             1 101    0  9284K  6088K RUN    0   0:03 15.51% rrdtool
53197 www             1 101    0  9292K  6096K RUN    0   0:03 15.51% rrdtool
53198 www             1 101    0  9284K  6088K RUN    0   0:03 15.42% rrdtool
53194 www             1 101    0  9288K  6092K RUN    0   0:03 15.08% rrdtool

Extended description:
 	I've installed Cacti on 30+ machines for 20+ organizations over the 
last 5 years and have never before experienced this.  I find tons of reports of 
this via Google and the 'search' function at cacti.net, but have yet to find 
the silver bullet that fixes the issue.

 	What would be causing this?  How can I fix it?  The rest of the Cacti 
interface loads instantly, so I have no reason to believe that it's a PHP 
limitation/setting, nor a resource issue with Apache in any way.

 	Advice?

-Jake