[Nottingham] [Talk] This *THURS* 20/07/06: Linuxing snippets

[Tom Bird]

Graeme Fowler wrote:
> On 21/07/2006 16:06, Tom Bird wrote:
>> You can make much prettier graphs with rrdtool.  Also, updating a 
>> database file rather than up to 4 images appeals to my sense of 
>> efficiency.
> 
> Thanks for the egg-sucking lesson :-/

No problem :)

Don't think I saw many of your rrd efforts in my time in the salt mine. 
  Almost interestingly, on the 25th it'll be 5 years to the day that I 
started there.

> As for the updates... strictly speaking, MRTG uses a database file. It's 
> just a comparatively inefficient one :)
> For sites (not mine, I must say) where there are large numbers of page 
> views, generating a static image which updates periodically is far more 
> efficient than generating four images via CGI for every page view.

You can use -z as of rrdtool 1.2, it only regenerates the png if it has 
to: "Only generate the graph if the current graph is out of date or not 
existent."  Of course, the nice pretty high colour pngs that 1.2 makes 
are about 10 times the size of the gifs the previous versions made...

Tom