[Orca-users] Re: Compressed "percol" files--safe to remove?

[Blair Zajac]

>From the newly entered FAQ answer at

http://www.orcaware.com/orca/docs/FAQ.txt

 3.16) Why should I keep my compressed percol-* or orcallator-* files?

       There are several reasons to keep the data files:

       1) If the RRD files get screwed up, you'll be able to
          regenerate them.
       2) If Orca ever needs to change the internal format of the RRD
          files, it'll need to regenerate them.

       3) If you ever want to look at older data in the RRD files, the
          older data has less resolution.  For example, if you want to
          look at data, say 6 months old, in the RRD files, it is
          averaged over a whole day.  You won't be able to get the 5
          minute data generated by orcallator.se.

          Here's the resolution of the data in the RRD files (here
          RRA is Round Robin Archive and there can be many in one RRD
          file) as defined in lib/Orca/Constants.pm

          # The first RRA is every 5 minutes for 200 hours, the second
          # is every 30 minutes for 31 days, the third is every 2
          # hours for 100 days, and the last is every day for 3 years.

Blair

Rusty Carruth wrote:
> 
> dtitzer at servicebench.com wrote:
> >
> > Is there a reason to keep compressed percol files? What's a reasonable time
> > for recycling those bits?
> 
> As Blair said, its just history.  If you never care to recreate
> history, delete them.
> 
> If you, like me, are a history buff (of the data kind!), stick them
> on CD and delete them from the hard drive (after compressing!).
> 
> However, if you expect to ever have to kill percol and restart it,
> I think that your plots will probably not have that info if you've
> deleted those files (certainly this will be true if you also delete
> the rrd files).
> 
> Which may or may not imply that you want to keep them for a year...
> 
> rc

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com> - Perl & sysadmin services for hire
Web and OS performance plots - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/