[collectd] Problems with 'traffic' plugin

[Vladyslav Bakayev]

Hello Florian.

Thu May 4 23:34:13 CEST 2006, Florian Forster wrote:

>> And do you guys use getifaddrs() for traffic, or do you depend on
>> /proc/net/dev parsing? And if getifaddrs() works for you, what
>> distro/kernel/etc do you use?
> I successfully use `getifaddrs' on Debian Sarge (x86, powerpc and
> sparc; glibc 2.3.2), Debian Sid (x86; glibc 2.3.6) and Mac OS X Tiger
> (10.4.6; BSD libc of unknown version).

I'm getting null values on (more or less) up-to-date Gentoo x86_64,
with glibc 2.3.5, so I just stepped back to collectd with old-style
proc parsing traffic plugin.

>> I hand-edited config.h to make traffic use the proc-parsing instead of
>> getifaddrs(), and that _does_ work (duh). And I guess that it gives
>> the exact same data as getifaddrs(), so I should be happy. But getting
>> at the data without harving to parse text would just feel better :)
> That's why I made i the default for Linux in the first place ;) Sorry I
> don't know what the matter is though. If more people are having the same
> problem I'll just make proc-parsing the default again (possibly with a
> configure option to change this).. Anyone?

I think its nice to have it in new way, but label it "experimental" or
such till we will see the root cause and know how to deal with it.

And btw, after restarting the collectd its almost guaranteed to have
traffic peak values which jump to the ceiling (rrddump shows 1.4e+18
while usually I have something around e+05 over there). Sure thing, it
can be edited by dump/restore to remove them :) Do you think we can
put some check on startup to save some "sanitised" value?

--
 SY, Vlad.