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Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:26:11 +0100
From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>
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To: Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org>
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Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Performance Tracker project update
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Ivan Voras wrote:
> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>> Erik Cederstrand wrote:
>>> Ivan Voras wrote:
>>>> I have a suggestion to make the graphs more readable: if a long
>>>> period was chosen by the user (e.g. > 100 days / plot points), don't
>>>> plot points and error bars, plot a simple line through the points.
>>>> Also, set all date strings on the X-axis to empty strings except for
>>>> the dates on 1/10ths of the interval.
>>> Noted. Thanks.
>> Actually the error bars are quite important to see what is going on.
>> Some of the metrics are very (too) noisy and if you only look at the
>> data points they sometimes appear to have a signal when they don't.
>> Ultimately that just means more data points should be taken per run for
>> those metrics, but the error bars are the signal for this.
> 
> Of course they are useful, but do we really need to see them when there
> are hundreds of samples plotted 1 pixel apart? (As I've said: keep them
> when when the user "zooms in" on an appropriate small number of
> samples). But this is an aesthetics-oriented idea, functionality won't
> be impaired either way so feel free to ignore it.

I think so, yeah.  Otherwise I'd waste time zooming in only to find the 
trends are measurement noise.

Kris