Cheshire Cat Computing

First of all, get rid of the Factor[]:300 as it is (as you say) confusing all the calculations.

There is a 'permiute' option ( and a 'perhour' option ) that you can use to make small values more meaningful; maybe using 'perminute' will help?

The totals will be calculated correctly if you do not use Factor (which also applies to toals) and instead us Options[]:perminute (which does not apply to totals).

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Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

Okay, great, without the Factor[] the calculations are correct. But even with the "perminute" option the values doesn't make sense, because I don't want to know the printed pages per minute. It would be better to display them in "per5minutes", since the values in the daily graph would correspond to the actual printed pages over the last 5 minutes. (Example: When printed 2 pages in the last 5 minutes, the value with the perminute option displays 0.4 which does not makes sense. It would be better to display "2 pages per 5 minutes").

Anyway, is there an option to draw the graphs with values that are the total amount of printed pages? I.e. in the weekly/monthly graph I could see the printed pages per day rather than the average/total value of "printed pages per minute"?

The problem is that MRTG wants to graph rates. In fact, everything is treated as a rate per second... this is fine for network traffic (large numbers per second) but not so good for things with a small value, like printed pages.

Even if the code were changed to add a new 'per5min' option, then you'd still have the problems caused by Data Normalisation resulting in decimal values instead of whole numbers.

You can set the 'integer' option, and the 'fixunit' extended option, to display in the closest integer and prevent 0.5 being displayed as 500 mpages. This can help, but unless you adjust the data collection to be exactly on the 5min boundary you'll be getting the effect of data normalisation. Tobi is rather reluctant to add an option to MRTG to disable the normalisation as (in his words), it means 'wrong data'. This is true if the value is not a gauge or is a rate, but...

Steve

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Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

Ok, thanks for your detailed post. I am already using the fixunit option. (But not the integer since it displays all "0" in the graph since I am not printing that much).

Okay, I see that the problem is the "MRTG is graphing rates" thing. Maybe I will try to send an email to Tobi
Thanks anyway!