[rrd-users] delayed updates

[Sam Umbach]

Mike,

One workaround I've seen for the huge volume of metric data is to
break your large RRD files with multiple DS's into multiple RRD files
with a single (or small number of) DS.  If you must avoid a spike in
your traffic, catching up with all the data at once impossible (i.e.,
you must throw something away or delay more recent data in order to
catch up with historical data).  You could discard historical
information for some DS's for which historical information is less
important and gaps are acceptable, while catching up w/ historical and
current data for the more important DS's.  With some more complex
queuing logic, you may not have to discard any data.

Another solution is to perform some data consolidation on the queued
data in order to reduce the number of data points you need to update
in your RRDs.  Unfortunately, if you have different RRAs using
different consolidation functions, consolidating the data before
passing it to rrdtool may (probably will) result in a loss of
information.  If it would be better to show only average numbers
(without min and max) instead of a gap in the graph, this may be an
reasonable trade-off.

-Sam Umbach