I'm not familiar with the JKFlow/flowviewer config, but I am familiar with 
maintaining tens of thousands of RRD files. The system I/O burden can be 
tremendous.  In a high-end SAN environment, I've seen RRD updates spike to 
5,000+ IOPS. Since the normal hard disk that most of us use can only handle 
about 100-200 IOPS, the result is blocking updates and a stuttering kernel.

RRDtool 1.4 to the rescue -- it includes rrdcached, a caching daemon that 
batches RRD updates and commits them later on. The daemon is supported with all 
existing code and perl modules by simply setting an environment variable. It 
does a very nice job of freeing your code from RRD blocks and spreading the RRD 
load to reduce the IOPS.

One other note -- as you think about automation, remember that netflow v5 from 
routers includes subnet information. You might be able to use that to build 
configuration files.

-Craig


On Sat, 15 Oct 2011, David Faught wrote:

> I am currently using flow-tools 0.68, FlowScan 1.06 with JKFlow 3.5.2,
> and FlowViewer 3.3.1 and all the NetFlow data is version 5.  The
> server processing this is currently receiving between 300 and 900
> flows/second, or between 150 and 450 kilobits/second of flow data,
> although this may as much as double over the next couple of years.
> 
> I am thinking of trying to use either FlowTracker or the JKFlow
> FlowScan reporting module to set up about 7000 separate individual
> tracking entries which are in pairs and then combining the pairs in
> 3500 group tracking entries.  I will have to come up with some
> automated way to build these entries based on a spreadsheet, but that
> part doesn't seem too hard to me.
> 
> So the question is, is this reasonable?  Do you have any idea what
> kind of resources the server would need to process and store this
> data?  And maybe have some room left to actually browse them?
> 
> Thanks for any guidance you can provide.
> 
> Regards,
> Dave Faught
> _______________________________________________
> Flow-tools mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mailman.splintered.net/mailman/listinfo/flow-tools
> 
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