Suggestion: Graph with Scale for connection bandwidth

1

Hello,

I have been thinking of paying for a higher bandwidth connection from my ISP. I’d like to check how often my connection is close to using all available bandwidth.

In my home it’s usually only spikes from streaming media that reach peak utilisation, not lengthy sessions. However if those peaks are frequent and impact users then it might be worth upgrading my connection with my ISP.

I use QoS heavily, but the Net-Traffic graphs (external) are also very good for seeing utilisation. The problem is that by default RRDTool changes the graph scale to match the bandwidth in the given time period.

Could someone please consider adding another graph similar to the “red0 Graph” on the “Net-Traffic graphs (external)” page which:

  • Uses the same data
  • Uses a fixed value for scale
  • Allows the user to manually set the scale of the download graph (positive axis)
  • Allows the user to manually set the scale of the upload graph (negative axis)

Ideally there would be some way to preserve peaks when reducing the data from Hour to Day to Week to Month to Year, but that’s another problem I’ve not found a solution for yet.

Thank you

2

I found where the function is which defines the rrdtool graph.
It is in sub updateifgraph in the /var/ipfire/graphs.pl script.
(Updating this function would also affect wireless and ipsec graphs, but I don’t use either)

However I realised that this isn’t the right approach. If I set the scale of the graphs to the fixed bandwith of my connection spikes would still be too small to see.

I’ll need to do further research in to the best way to determine when an internet link could be upgraded to improve performance. Such a calculation will be a bit subjective, based on the number of times bandwidth was a limitation and the cost of increasing.