memory-larrd.pl with linux, solaris, windows (Re: {bb} bb-memory + larrd ... does it only graph Physical and not Actual?)

[Charles Jones <jonescr@cisco.com>]

I had an email problem which made me miss any replies to this...I 
checked the archive and found a reply:

"Linux caches fairly aggressively (the basic assumption being made is 
that "free memory is wasted memory"), so just looking at total physical 
used versus physical free isn't terribly useful. That's where the Actual 
line (139M Used) comes into play. It subtracts the cache out from the 
total used.... later, chris "

Chris,

I know that is where the problem is.  I guess my question really should 
be, has anyone successfully modified memory-larrd.sh  so that it gets 
the correct values for both Solaris and Linux (and Win32)? The problem 
is that memory-larrd is graphing the "Physical" value instead of the 
"Actual" value. I will illustrate the problem

Linux output:
green Mon Sep 13 11:24:11 MST 2004 - Memory OK
Memory    Used    Total    Percentage
Physical    976M    1006M    97%
Actual    314M    1006M    31%
Swap        60M    2051M    2%

Solaris output:
green Mon Sep 13 11:27:05 MST 2004 - Memory OK
Memory    Used    Total    Percentage
Physical    207M    1024M    20%
Actual    -1M    1024M    0%
Swap        18M    1288M    1%

Win32 output:
status hostname.memory green Mon Sep 13 11:41:30 2004 - Memory OK
Memory    Used   Total  Pctg
Physical:     467M   1023M   45%
Virtual:       12M   2047M    0%
Page:         414M   2462M   16%

The Solaris graphs produced by larrd are useful and give a good idea of 
the memory trends.  The graphs produced by larrd for linux machines 
however is not, because as pointed out, the output of the linux "free" 
command reflects linux's aggressive memory caching, and so the linux 
larrd memory graphs are always pegged near 100% since it gets the value 
for "Physical" instead of "Actual".  So far I have not been able to get 
larrd to do any trends for windows boxes, but I suspect that is another 
issue altogether.  The win32 output is similar to the Solaris output so 
once I get trending working for those I suspect it will look normal.

My thoughts on possible solutions:
1. Modify memory-larrd to tell the difference between Solaris and Linux 
(maybe by looking for the "-1" to denote Solaris), so that it can graph 
the "Actual" instead of "Physical" values for Linux.
2. Modify bb-memory so that its Linux output is more like the Solaris 
output, or just graphing Actual in place of Physical

I would prefer #1 since #2 involves pushing out a new bb-memory to every 
host and restarting all the clients. From looking at memory-larrd.pl, it 
looks like the fix would be a one-liner around the part where it sets 
the VALUE variable.  If a fix does not allready exist, I make my own, 
test it, and post the results.

-Charles


Charles Jones wrote:

> I have bb-memory.sh (3.0) setup with larrd. Os is RedHat Linux 9, and 
> FC2. All the graphs are showing near 100%, because :
>
> green Fri Sep 3 10:54:16 MST 2004 - Memory OK
>   Memory    Used    Total    Percentage
> Physical    994M    1007M    98%
> Actual    139M    1007M    13%
> Swap        9M    1027M    0%
>
>
> an actual "free" command on the machine in question:
> # free              total       used       free     shared    
> buffers     cached
> Mem:       1032152    1018236      13916          0      20532     855084
> -/+ buffers/cache:     142620     889532
> Swap:      1052248      10016    1042232
>
>
> Graphing the physical value that bb-memory is getting isn't very 
> useful since its always near 100%.
> Any comments or suggestions are welcome.
>
> -Charles


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