The Zabbix Escalator is defined to run on a frequency of 3s in the source. However it does not honor this behavior.

A more fair solution wold be to sleep for abs(frequency - time_end - time_start) that way under normal circumstances the escalator will execute every 3s, under a heavy workload where the escalator is running over the 3s frequency it will not be further delayed.

A fix for this is trivial (2-4 lines) and I can supply a patch if you need.