[smokeping-users] Regarding Database size ......

[Peter Kristolaitis]

First of all, happy new year to everyone on the list!  I hope that 2010
is a productive and fruitful year for you all.

To answer the easy question first -- yes, your RRA files will be 2.8MB
forever.  An RRA 'database' contains a finite, static number of records,
and old records are discarded as new data is put in;  rrdtool makes the
files large enough to handle all possible records at creation time, so
your file will never grow.

With regard to how long Smokeping will continue graphing -- well,
forever.  Because old records are cycled out when new data is put in,
Smokeping will continue to operate indefinitely and will only show
'current' data.   A related issue is how much *history* will be
retained, and this is strictly dependent on how you've configured
Smokeping (specifically, the 'step' value and the 'steps' and 'rows'
data from the RRA definitions in the '*** Database ***' section of the
configuration file).

Example:

*** Database ***

step = 30
pings = 20

# cons   xff steps rows
AVERAGE  0.5   1   1008
AVERAGE  0.5  12   4320
    MIN  0.5  12   4320
    MAX  0.5  12   4320
AVERAGE  0.5 144    720
    MAX  0.5 144    720
    MIN  0.5 144    720

The 'step = 30' part means that Smokeping will poll (and thus generate a
new RRA row) every 30 seconds.

The 'steps' part of the RRA definition are how many 'step's are
consolidated for a given row.  In the example, we have 1, 12, and 144; 
this means that we're storing data at 3 different levels of
granularity:  1*30 = 30 seconds, 12*30 = 360 seconds, and 144*30 = 4320
seconds.

The 'rows' part of the RRA definition tells you how many records that
RRA definition will hold.

Using 'step', 'steps' and 'rows', you can calculate how much 'time' an
RRA will cover:
   time in seconds = step * steps * rows

So if we look at the line "AVERAGE 0.5 144 720", it will hold:
    time = 30 * 144 * 720 = 3,110,400 seconds (36 days)

This means that you will be able to get at most 36 days of history at a
granularity of 72 minutes (30*144 seconds).   If you wanted to see the
data more granularly (6 minutes -- 30*12 seconds), then you would have
to set your graphs to show at most 30*12*4320 = 1,555,200 seconds (18 days).

- Peter



Jimmyboy wrote:
> Hi All,
>  
> I am using Smokeping 2.3 on my Ubuntu desktop machine since more than
> 1 month. The size of all .rra files shows up as 2.8MB ever since they
> have been created.
>  
> Can anyone tell me how do I know till what time would Smokeping
> continue graphing. Is it going to be a few months, 1 year or 2,
> etc...? Will the size remain 2.8MB forever?
>  
>  
> Thanks,
> Jimmy Jose
>  
> =-=-=
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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