Stripcharts

Goals

Stripcharts is a system for recording and displaying time-varying system load and performance information. The basic idea:

• A set of scripts, run periodically using crontab, record performance metrics (CPU load, network connection rates, queue lengths, etc.) as time-stamped entries in log files.
• A web interface lets you generate graphs of combinations of these quantities, over whatever time scale you want.

Looking at these graphs can be a major help in tracking down problems in complex server systems. Stripcharts is independent of BOINC, but it's especially helpful for diagnosing performance problems in BOINC servers.

Stripchart data

• CPU load
• number of users
• number of results
• number of results sent
• number of results returned
• disk usage
• connections/second
• network bandwidth