Poller Hangs and Eventually Stops

We had a device that was taking a long time to poll via SNMP. Eventually we had 6 poller processes running for just that one device and none of them were finishing. The logs in the server said

(URGENT: poller-wrapper.py poller not started because already running 6 processes, load average (5min) 11.41)

All polling on the server stopped until I killed those processes. Then it did it again. I eventually removed that device and resolved the issue. I'm wondering if there is a timer or setting I can set to kill these processes before they cause an issue like this again?