[Orca-dev] Announce: Orca-0.27b2 released

[Blair Zajac]

Hello,

I'm releasing orca version 0.27b2.  Unless there are any problems with this
release, it will become version 0.27.

It is available at

http://www.orcaware.com/orca/pub/

Changes in this release from 0.27b1 are below.

Let me know of any problems with this release.

Enjoy,
Blair


NEW IN ORCA 0.27b2
==================

 1) Orca has a new home page:

      http://www.orcaware.com/

    All of the links in Orca, orcallator.se and the orcallator.se
    configuration file have been updated to point to the new web site.

 2) To allow input data files to represent that a measurement is not
    available or could not be measured, the letter 'U' can be placed
    where the numerical data would normally appear.  This is better
    than storing an out-of-range value in the input data files.  The
    'U' is passed to RRDtool which properly handles this unknown
    value.

 3) Fix a bug where Orca would leave around many defunct bunzip2,
    gunzip or uncompress processes when reading compressed input
    data files using a separate process to pipe in the uncompressed
    data.  Orca now closes the pipe when the end of file has been
    reached allowing the system to reap the defunct processes.

 4) Include and require Digest::MD5 2.16 and Storable 1.0.13.

The following changes are what's new in orcallator.se 1.28 and the
orcallator.cfg file since version 1.23 which was included with Orca
0.26.  All of the changes below are taken advantage of in the included
orcallator.cfg and start_orcallator files.

 5) In orcallator.cfg.in, the Disk Run Percent plots also match for
    disk_runp_sd\d+ in addition to disk_runp_md\d+.

 6) Change the output log filename format from percol-%Y-%m-%d to
    percol-%Y-%m-%d-XXX, where XXX is a number starting at 0 that is
    incremented anytime the number of output columns changes or type
    of data stored in a column changes.  This is in addition to the
    creation of a new log filename when a new day starts.  Whenever
    the program needs to create a new log file for any reason, it will
    search for the smallest XXX so that there are no log files named
    percol-%Y-%m-%d-XXX{,.Z,.gz,.bz2}.  If the COMPRESSOR
    environmental is set and any uncompressed files are found while
    looking for the smallest XXX, they are compressed with the
    COMPRESSOR command.  orcallator.cfg.in's find_files has been
    updated to find the new log filenames generated by orcallator.se
    1.28.

 7) Instead of outputting the number of CPUs only when WATCH_MUTEX is
    defined, output it when either WATCH_CPU or WATCH_MUTEX is
    defined.  Only declare and update tmp_mutex if WATCH_MUTEX
    defined.

 8) Add three parameters that vmstat outputs to the output files that
    orcallator.se generates, #runque, vmstat's `r' column, which is
    the number of processes in the run queue waiting to run on a CPU,
    #waiting, vmstat's `b' column, which is the number of processes
    blocked for resourceses (I/O, paging), and #swpque, vmstat's `w',
    the number of proceses runnable but swapped out.  In
    orcallator.cfg.in add a new plot titled "Processes in Run
    Queue/Waiting/Swapped" to plot the new measurements.

 9) Check [wr]lentime to see if an EMC is using a fake disk for
    control.  EMC disks have a fake disk which commands are run over
    to configure the disk array or to get stats from; they are not
    real data transfers. They cause 1000 MB/sec writes to appear in
    the stats.  I still get them but not as often with this bit of
    code in.  If the I/O which occurred in the last five minutes is
    not greater than 1/100sec then it is not a very valid stat anyway.
    What hapens is that we can have a small I/O, say 1024 bytes, in a
    1/100sec = 1024*100/sec.  Make sure to define
    HAVE_EMC_DISK_CONTROL to enable this check.  Patch contributed by
    Damon Atkins <Damon.Atkins at nabaus.com.au>.

10) Increase MAX_COLUMNS from 512 to 2048.