I have been monitoring the performance of a couple of Heavy Forwarders and identified something I found weird in the Monitoring Console > Indexing > Performance > Indexing Performance: Advanced > Splunkd Thread Activity panel. When I looked at the metrics.log for the httpclientpollingthread_<deploymentclient-guid> thread, the ratio value was a constant "1.00".
I confirmed that deploymentclient.conf > [deployment-client] > phoneHomeIntervalInSecs is set to 300 seconds (5 minutes), so why would this polling thread to the Deployment Server be constantly running instead of just pausing in between phone home intervals?
I can't find any information online or in the documentaion about this thread and the connection between these Heavy Forwarders and the Deployment Server is working.