[collectd] What are "interesting results" mentioned in FAQ?

[Piotr Hosowicz]

Hi everybody,

I am running a Python script that checks some stats and sends them to 
stdout and further to the collectd server via exec plugin. I watched the 
graphs and I saw very strange results. When I dumped collected RRD files 
to XML i saw that data was not normal at all, I expectd it to be 
numerial thousends / tens of thousands. Instead in the dumpo I saw a lot 
of NaN's , fractional "almost zeroes" and very hight numbers in the 
order of millions. Is this said interesting result? - I foubnd in the FAQ:

#
Can I adjust the interval in which data is collected?
Yes, since version 3.9.0 this can be set at compile-time. Keep in mind, 
though, that this will change the layout of the generated RRD-files. 
Also, clients and servers should have the same setting here to avoid 
interesting results.
Version 4.0 allows this setting to be adjusted in the configfile.

Server: FreeBSD, as far as I cansee in the /usr/ports/... subdirs it is 
collectd 4.1.2 and I bet it was built with default settings, I see in 
the collectd.conf Interval is set to 60 (seconds, I suppose).

Clients: Linux, collectd 4.5.1, built without any interval settings, I 
even do not see them in ./configure --help . There's a commented out, I 
suppose the default setting of the interval set at 10. It might be that 
the problem is that my script passes data to collectd specifying 
interval=60 , but I had started running it with intervals of 5 or 10 
seconds, specified in the stdout output.

My questions are:

1. Is this interesting result mentioned in the FAQ?

2. Is deleting the wrong databases the only way to straighten things? 
And how to set the things up avoiding such corruption in the future?

I am in a bit of a hurry. We wanted to collect and graph the data just 
now, because of specifics of our business and the Holidays - Christmas 
and New Year. For the time being we must do with stats collected locally 
on the server as CSV. But then comes the New Year and I'd be very happy 
if the data would be collected properly as RRD files.

Regards,

Piotr Hosowicz

PS: Merry Christmas to all of you and  Happy New Year