[Orca-dev] Patch to fix volatile disk/filesystem plot problem

[Blair Zajac]

John Garner wrote:

> NOTE: I originally sent this at the end of april but got no response, so 
> I'm kicking it out again... Diffs were against the 220 rev, hopefully 
> they are still valid --jg
> 
> All,
> 
> I've seen some discussions regarding multiple filesystem and disk plots 
> from orcallator whenever new disks or filesystems are added or removed. 
> Due to the way that orca keeps track of things (with the data source 
> field name used directly in the resulting file), it appeared to be a 
> problem that was still persistent. (I still had the problem with version 
> 220 out of the svn repository, and thanks to our the nightly vxfs 
> snapshots, it got really ugly for me)
> 
> After lots of traces and work to try and understand what i was getting 
> myself into, I made a few mods to lib/Orca/Config.pm, 
> lib/Orca/ImageFile.pm and lib/Orca/SourceFile.pm in an attempt to fix 
> the problem.
> 
> In the end, what i did was add a new param to a plot, volatile, that 
> tells orca that this particular plot will have data sources come and go 
> on a whim. Once orca sees this flag, it will treat that plot slightly 
> differently in terms of how it looks up the plot and keeps track of what 
> data is in the plot. It uses the value of the flag in place of the data 
> source names for the purpose of file names. Thus, the disk_runp plot 
> would look like this:

Hi John,

Thanks for the patch.  I put a modified version of it in the Orca's Subversion 
tree so that the next version of Orca will have it.

The problem it turns out only occurs on plots with a single data line with a 
regex match in it, so we don't need the volatile keyword.  Orca treats all these 
plots this way so they all get fixed.  This is a nicer solution so that any 
configuration files don't have to be modified.

You can download a current Orca snapshot at

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

Thanks again for the work to track this down.

Best,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com>
Plots of your system's performance - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/