Mirador - Server Monitoring

Memory management options

This tutorial covers the following topics:

• Defining memory management related preferences (memory storage limit, enabling disk storage and disk storage limit)
• Using the "Enable disk storage index" option on the search tab to include results stored on disk in local filtering and in sorting
• Using the memory storage scrollbar and the disk storage scrollbar to browse the search results.

It is based on the Windows version of Retrospective.

Processing large data volumes requires a lot of system memory. As system resources are shared between running processes and applications, Retrospective can only take up a limited space of RAM. To overcome this limit, Retrospective can store search results on the hard drive.

Step 1: Define memory limit per search/monitor tab and enable hard drive storage.

• Select File -> Preferences.
• Select the Result Options settings group.
• Define your memory storage limit PER search / monitor tab.
• Check the Enable disk storage option.
• Define the Disk storage limit.

Step 2: Search log files.

   Make sure that the disk storage option is still active when searching.

Step 3: Use local filtering to filter the results.

A search query may produce a large number of results. Local filtering enables narrowing result sets without having to redefine search criterias and processing log files once again.

 If you want to include the result data stored on the hard drive in the data that local filtering / sorting acts upon, you can click  ("Enable disk storage index"). 

The "Enable disk storage index" only becomes available once Retrospective has finished processing the log files.

With this option disabled, Retrospective will only process the results stored in system memory when filtering or sorting search results.

Retrospective indicates that certain results are stored on hard drive, by displaying two separate scroll bars:

• Memory storage scrollbar: Move this slider to browse result data which is currently loaded into the memory. 
• Disk storage scrollbar: Move this slider to load another chunk of data from the hard drive into the memory.

 Moving the memory storage scrollbar slider to the beginning / end will trigger a reload from the disk storage as well. This means you can browse through the entire data by just using the memory storage scrollbar; this will just take a lot longer to browse through a large result set. That is where the disk storage scrollbar comes in very handy: It allows you to scroll faster within large result sets.