Dan,

        Thank you very much for your reply.  Some of this is information
        which is new to me, or which I wasn't sure of.  Other parts are
        "old news", but still interesting.

        Comments in line ...

On 4 Feb 2008, at 14:53, McDonald, Dan wrote:

an RRDtol front-end like routers2.cgi expects to find each router in a
separate file.  That makes it possible to display huge hierarchies of
routers and sites.  So, using separate files helps scale the display
functions, making the overall system more scalable.

        You seem to be saying that routers2.cgi treats "Include" as
        an implicit configuration instruction for grouping or
        partitioning the display.  This is what I understood from
        some reading, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to confirm
        from experience.

        Overloading "Include" in this way seems to me to introduce
        undesirable brittleness.  IMO, "Include" should simply make
        a collection of configuration files appear as one large file,
        and organization of the display should be determined by
        explicit configuration directives.

If I had to run cfgmaker for all of my managed boxes at once, it would
take close to an hour, but with my configurations segmented I can
re-learn individual devices in just a few seconds.  This "ease of
administration" is actually a critical scalability concern when you have
large mrtg monitoring complexes.

        I understand.  Since back whenever I first lost monitoring because
        of a syntax error in specifying some hand-crafted new target, I've
        always thought of this as a "basic survivability" issue rather than
        in terms of "scalability".  I see what you mean too.

Running under linux, a large number of Includes: with forks: 20 is going to perform much better than twenty separate instances, as there is less
parsing to do and more shared code.  I know that is comparing "2" and
"3", but again it continues to demonstrate a more scalable solution.


        OTOH, the overhead you mention only occurs during startup, and
        re-starting is less disruptive if only a single instance,
        without "Include", has to be interrupted.

        I'm wondering whether your idea that a single generously-included
        and well-forked instance will perfom better than an equivalent
        collection of include-free instances is based on a
        "high-quality educated guess" (not to be discounted), or rather
        on measurements. Has anyone done a study and published the results?


        Best regards,

        Niall O'Reilly
        University College Dublin IT Services

        PGP key ID: AE995ED9 (see www.pgp.net)
        Fingerprint: 23DC C6DE 8874 2432 2BE0 3905 7987 E48D AE99 5ED9



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