A couple of time eaters

[colejv]

I thought I would post a couple of problems I have experienced that had me puzzled for a while, they both are a result of sloppy typing and are time consuming because I have 90 "main" nodes and tend to make changes in bulk and tweak bit here and there when I am scrolling by (2500 lines in the config).

The first one is 96 only, so far I have done it twice about three weeks apart (long enough for me to forget what caused the problem).

If you call an undefined template weathermap stops working
no new maps are generated and the log plugin for cacti displays a php error when you attempt to access it

the first time I did it was a just a regular typo, the second the time I title cased the template name so I had TEMPLATE temp defined and called TEMPLATE Temp

The other time killer is caused by blank spaces, I followed the excellent tutorial on displaying host status and 5 or 6 of my hosts did not work, I really went overboard trying to figure out why, before I finally noticed the extra character space using the arrow keys, apparently I had hit the space bar after typing out

[Howie]

OK. Both of those could be dealt with better

I can't see any problem with always trimming trailing spaces, can you?

[colejv]

No I can't see a problem with eliminating trailing spaces, and I did not mention it but one of the problems I had was a trailing tab, in php using trim() would take care of all of it (leading,trailing space/tab/cr) but may not work out in some instances.

That being said, for an application like this I think users should be aware of this type of issue, but not expect the code to fix their sloppiness for them.

To me not fixing the problem with code allows the application to scale further on less resources, now if the fix was a one time deal the config was adjusted once to strip white spaces then ok, but if fixing it chews up clock cycles every time the app runs then I am against it.

I am I making any sense here?

What does everyone else think?

[Howie]

It's just a case of tweaking the regexps that are used to match the config commands so they don't pick up the spaces in the first place. It's simple enough to say "everything apart from whitespace on the end" instead of "everything on the end". Considering how much other stuff is going on in a weathermap run (e.g. either running dozens of rrdtool processes or dozens of mysql queries), I don't think it's an efficiency issue.

[colejv]

Well obviously I defer

By the way GREAT product