Hi there,
looking through the mailing list archive, I found several requests
like mine over the last years:
"Why won't negative values show up in my graph when I use --lograrithmic?"
The answer was mostly that a logarithm is not defined for negative
numbers.
What I want to achieve (and what I think those other proponents also
had in mind) is that I essentially have some of my data mirrored at
the x-axis for better readability (don't draw two values on top of
each other).
For example I plot outgoing packets on my network as a positive values
while I plot the incoming packets via CDEF:output=0,outputx,- as
negative values. So the outgoing rate is shown above the x-axis and
the incoming rate below the x-axis.
To tame network spikes somewhat I want to change the graph mode to
logarithmic. This works for the positive values, but the negative
values simply vanish. I just want the same transormation that happens
to the positive values applied 'mirrored' the the negative values.
Think of something like a "display-logarithm" function defined like
this:
double disp_log(double y)
{
if (y == 0) {
return 0;
} else if (y > 0) {
return log(y);
} else {
return -log(-y);
}
}
While "-log(-y)" might look weird in a mathematical context I think that
it makes sense in describing "do the same as for positive values, only
in the other direction".
I have had a look at rrdgraph.c and think that I found the calculation
of the final y value for a given data point in the ytr() method. But
I did not yet fully figure out how im->minval is computed (im->minval
seems to be the reason for negative values to be cut off).
(And if this makes sense at all, it should be probably be controlled
by a commandline parametera and I have not yet started to look what
else needs to be changed then: commandline parsing, internal
configuration state, manpages, documentation...)
What do you think of this?
Would the be a useful feature?
Could this somehow be implemented?
Regards
Christian
--
....Christian.Garbs....................................https://www.cgarbs.de
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