rrdtool performance tuning (fwd)

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 11:13:09AM +0300, Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:
> any hints to tune rrdtool with ~30k rrd files (approx 2k target devices)?
> 
> machine is mostly IO-bound, showing 100% disk load with 8 or sometimes even 3 
> mB/s, 300-400 tps (it's 2 SATA300 disks in gmirror)

Ideas: 

1) Stop using rrdtool?  This comment is somewhat in jest -- sometimes
you can't avoid using it because it's part of something like cricket,
cacti, etc., but simultaneously, rrdtool is quite atrocious as far as
softwares go.  I think it's popular because MRTG has a long-standing
track record, thus Tobi's software is well-known.

2) Consider alternative software such as:

* http://torrus.org/
* http://www.dynw.com/iog/
* A suite/library on Sourceforge somewhere which I cannot remember the
  name of, but acted as a data-over-time storage/graphing/plotting
  alternative to RRDtool.  The name of the program was 3 letters, and
  we used to have a port for it, and may still, if I could remember
  the name of it.
* Write your own (consider using SVG-based data, which you hand a web
  browser, and let the browser render the results)

3) Consider load balancing the polling (distributing the polling tasks
across 2-4 boxes, then store the results on an NFS share)

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |