Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote
> One of the things I've been planning to add to JKstat for a long while is
> the ability to read saved kstat -p output. (I'm essentially done with that,
> and it works quite well.) Which got me wondering, and I then started to
> ask myself:
> 
> What if we just scrapped the current sar collector (sadc) and just saved
> kstat -p output (or something like it) instead?

[snip]
> 

> On one of my machines, a thor, a regular sar datapoint is about 64k.
> The kstat -p output is about a meg, but zip gets that down to 160k, and
> 7z does significantly better. On a T5140, the sar data is about 20k and
> kstat about  2 meg, so there the difference is much larger. But I feel the
> idea has promise - in the best case we're almost there already, without
> optimizing the saved format or trimming unnecessary data.
> 
> Note that while I mentioned something like kstat -p, I'm not necessarily
> thinking of that as the final format - you would want something more
> compact, and wouldn't necessarily want to encode numbers as strings.

  Text isn't a bad format if you have a lot of zeros: in a previous life
I had to design a format for spreadsheets, and found that text was
- inexpensive to generate (there's very good code for divide-by-ten,
  using shift and subtract)
- compact for small numbers, of which there seems to be a lot.
- compressible up the yazoo!

--dave c-b
-- 
David Collier-Brown            | Always do right. This will gratify
Sun Microsystems, Toronto      | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at sun.com                 |                      -- Mark Twain
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