I saw this morning that RRDtool 1.4 was released. While there are a lot of changes, the biggest one seems to be the addition of rrdcached. From the release notes:

The RRD Caching Daemon can dramatically improve the ‘update’ performance of your system. Due to file handling overheads, the time it takes todo one update is virtually the same as to doing two updates in a row.

The Cache Daemon intercepts rrdtool update calls, assembling multiple updates before writing them to the actual rrd file. When calling rrdtool graph in such a setup, the command will tell the daemon to flush out all pending updates for the rrd files, required to draw the graph.

What I think is funny about this is that Matt Brozowski added this same functionality to OpenNMS years ago. It has been the only way we have been able to keep up with data collection at our larger installations.

The next time I get access to a large environment, I’d love to measure the performance of OpenNMS running with JRobin and queuing versus OpenNMS running with RRDtool with rrdcached and no queuing. If anyone has time to play with this, please let me know the results. You will need to compile jrrd against 1.4, of course. Also, it doesn’t look like Dag Wieers has 1.4 RPMs yet, but my guess is that he will soon.