[rrd-users] Atomicity of updates from a reader's POV ?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

I'm scoping out an application which will likely use RRD as its data
storage backend. The structure will be such that there is one process
collecting samples & writing them out to the RRD logs (perhaps as frequently
as one batch of update every 1-5 seconds). In parallel with this, there
can be one or more readers extracting data from the RRD logs.

My question is: are the updates applied  atomically as far as the readers
are concerned? I notice that the code in the update method takes out a write
fcntl() lock on the database, and then performs a whole sequence of fwrite() 
calls. The fetch methods do not take out a corresponding read lock with
fcntl(). Thus if a reader were to extract data while the writer is in the
middle of its sequence of fwrite() calls, could the reader get either 
corrupt, or incomplete data for the most recent sample ?  I'm hoping the
data file format is structured such that the reader will never see a partial
updated sample, but I can't tell for sure by looking at the code. 

Any confirmation of the behaviour when there are concurrent updates & readers
would be very helpful

Regards,
Dan.
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