[rrd-users] Strange behavior when using CDEF to divide two values

[Alex van den Bogaerdt]

Without diving deep into this problem, the first thing that pops up in my 
mind is:

Do you know about, and understand, data normalization and consolidation?

http://rrdtool.vandenbogaerdt.nl/process.php

Be aware that consolidation-like behaviour may also occur while graphing, so 
the number of horizontal pixels vs. the number of time slots does affect the 
outcome.

cheers,
Alex

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wesley PA4WDH" <pa4wdh at yahoo.com>
To: <rrd-users at lists.oetiker.ch>
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 11:13 AM
Subject: [rrd-users] Strange behavior when using CDEF to divide two values


> Hi All,
>
> I'm running some rrdtool data collection and i see some strange behavior 
> when i try to divide two DS's with a CDEF.
>
> I'm collecting the length of traffic jams and the number of traffic jams 
> in my country and store them in a rrd database. All is well and graphs 
> look good. Now i would like to calculate the average length by dividing 
> the total length with the number. I thought this would be easy by just 
> writing a CDEF:AVG=LENGTH,COUNT,/ line and graphing AVG ... but how wrong 
> could i be .. :-)
>
> First i got a lot of high spikes in my graph. I noticed this happened when 
> the "COUNT" was 0, so actually a division by zero. I thought this would 
> render to NaN but it didn't :-) I solved this by storing NaN in the rrd 
> when the value is 0. Are there any other/better solutions ?
>
> Now the graph looks nice but the value isn't correct. I saved some files 
> for you to see: http://ernstagn.home.xs4all.nl/rrd/
> Here you see the three graphs (length number and average) and dump.xml is 
> a "rrdtool dump" xml of the database.
> You can see that the value plotted for the average is not correct given 
> the input values. For example at 11:00 at the left of the graph: Total 
> length was 12km, and the number was 4, so the average should be 3. 
> However, the average graph plots at about 1.7.
> During midnight there is a similar example: There are 4 traffic jams of 
> about 8km, but the average hardly plots above 0.
> I've tried with "length" and "count" swapped in the RPN, but that didn't 
> work out either.
>
> Just to make sure i'm not making any mistake with the calculation i tried 
> to make an awk script which does the same with an xml export and there i 
> get the values i'd expect.
>
> Does anyone know how to solve this ? I'm using rrdtool version 1.4.7.