[rrd-developers] Suggestion for NAN-safe TREND operation

[Bernhard Fischer]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 12:45:36AM +0200, Tobias Oetiker wrote:
>>written daemons. In my rrd data i have often short periods of missing
>>data. In result the trend curve is missing over the complete sliding
>>window. So i modified the TREND function to ignore NAN-number. I

>Hi Timo,
>
>NAN safe TREND sounds interesting ...

Note that this should happen much, much less frequent (or not at all)
with current trunk, since rrdtool-1.2 is excercising the hard-disks way
too much, as opposed to the upcoming 1.3 version.

Since you seem to observe gaps in your graphs, i assume that you also
suffer from very high load-average¹) due to waiting on blocking I/O, which
a) renders your machine unuseable for interactive use
b) is responsible for the fact that your data-collection and/or RRD
   updates cannot finish in due time.

The new file access method introduced in rrdtool-1.3 has several
advantages over the FILE* (filp) based implementation that rrdtool-1.2
uses:
a) less copying.
  The filp-based I/O had to do more than 3 (!) copies per RRD, whereas
  the mmap-based I/O in rrdtool-1.3 does only 1 copy (in the kernel).
  This greatly reduces the stress upon the memory-subsystem of your
  host.
b) less buffer-cache pollution.
  As a consequence of a), we don't pollute the caches like the
  filp-based file accessors did.
c) less seeking
  The filp-based I/O did several dozend (blocking!) seeks to update
  the internal positions from where to read/write.
  In the mmap-based implementation, we do not seek at all, thus greatly
  reducing the time spent on-disk. We just calculate some integer
  offsets into the file and use those for our read/write operations.
d) less read/write ops
  While the filp-based file-accessor approach did blocking reads/writes
  (interleved with a dozend seeks) to read RRDs, then copy this data to
  a malloc()ed area, eventually updated this now in-memory data only to
  do a blocking write to propagate the update back to the file, the
  mmap-based accessors operate directly on the 1 copy we created when
  opening the RRD file.


¹) where too high of course depends on the number of rrd's you have, but
generally, everything above 1.0 which *blocks* will get you into trouble
sooner or later.
>
>if you provide a patch for current trunk I will be glad to include
>it for 1.3 ... make sure you patch docs as well.

And while you're at it, give 1.3 a whirl and let us know if this makes
the immediate need for your patch obsolete. That said, i can see how
your proposal is still something very useful for machines that are way
too small for the workload they are supposed to handle.

cheers,