Least busiest time on the Connect:Direct node?

Day 15

Often when you need to make a change to a production Connect:Direct server,  you want to know when would be the best time to do it.

Sometimes you want to add additional transfers but want to schedule them at a time that does not put all the load at one time of the day.

Either way you can use the following short script to give you a histogram showing the activity on the local node to identify the best times for scheduling transfers or making configuration changes with as little impact to existing transfers.

I first did this for UNIX Connect:Direct nodes and was then asked if something similar could be done for Windows Connect:Direct nodes.  The Windows script for this used VBScript and an HTML application showing the histogram in HTML and the command line technique you have seen previously.  I’ll save that description for a later post.

This post will just address the UNIX solution to this problem.

You need to feed the “cdhours” shell function with the Connect:Direct UNIX statistics files for the period you are interested in.  To do this you probably want to be in the “work” directory for the local node for convenience where the statistics files are generated.

An example of how to use the script is given in the comment at the top of the script.

This script was the beginning of a collection of scripts to handle querying the Connect:Direct UNIX statistics/configuration files and the Secure+ configuration.

Next we will look at showing a histogram of the volume of data going through a Connect:Direct node ordered by remote node.  Useful for capacity planning and also billing.

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# Connect:Direct Activity by hour Histogram
# =========================================
#
# Usage: cdhours
#
# $ cat S20100903.??? | cdhours
#
# To get a better picture for the month you could say
#
# $ cat S201009??.??? | cdhours
#
# Hours   Transfers
# =====   =========
#
# 00      54 #############
# 01      48 ############
# 02      54 #############
# 03     20 ##############################
# 04    244 ###############################################################
# 05      86 ######################
# 06      66 #################
# 07      76 ###################
# 08      36 #########
# 09       0
# 10      44 ###########
# 11    190 #################################################
# 12      48 ############
# 13      62 ################
# 14      30 #######
# 15      28 #######
# 16      85 #####################
# 17    221 #########################################################
# 18       0
# 19       0
# 20       0
# 21       0
# 22       0
# 23       0
#

function cdhours
{
       _FILES=$*
       # How many columns does the terminal have
       _COLS=`tput cols`
       # We are interested in the Copy Termination ReCords (CTRC)
       cat $_FILES | grep RECI=CTRC | nawk "{print $2}" | \
       nawk -v cols=$_COLS '
BEGIN{
       # Initialise the array that represents the histogram
       hours_per_day=24
       for(h=0;h < hours_per_day;h++)
       {
               # The keys of the array are packed with a leading zero
               hour=sprintf("%02d",h)
               tally[hour]=0
       }
}
       # This section gets executed for all records passed to nawk
       {
               split($2,fields,":")
               # Update the tally of these records that falls within this particular hour
               tally[fields[1]]++
       }
END{
       for(h=0;h < hours_per_day;h++)
       {
               # The keys of the array are packed with a leading zero
               hour=sprintf("%02d",h)
               # Keep track of the maximum number of tally marks so we can scale the histogram
               if(tally[hour] > max)
               {
                       max=tally[hour]
               }
       }
       node_name_length=16
       # Scale factor to make the histogram fit in the terminal window
       scale=(cols-(node_name_length+1))/max;

       printf("Hours\tTransfers\n")
       printf("=====\t=========\n\n")
       for(h=0;h < hours_per_day;h++)
       {
               # The keys of the array are packed with a leading zero
               hour=sprintf("%02d",h)
               # Scale the histogram bar to fit in terminal window
               bar=tally[hour]*scale
               printf "%3s\t%5d ",hour,tally[hour]
               # Generate the histogram bar
               for(b=1;b <= bar;b++)printf "#";
               printf "\n"
       }
}
'}

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