Stats Network throughput (b)its not (B)ytes

[A Former User]

I noticed the Network throughput in Stats is in Bytes not bits. I am suggesting this be changed to be "more correct". A common misconception is that Bytes also applies to networking, it doesn't. In the context of networking speeds the factor is 1000 not 1024. Memory allocation or storage use a factor of 1024. In the context of networking a factor of 1000 is the industry standard.

[olivierlambert]

Hi!

Sadly, this is the number fetched from XAPI directly, not computed by Xen Orchestra…

It would require an extra computation to change the number of the fly. It might be better to modify XAPI to use the right unit from the start.

[nackstein]

@noaks98 I agree that networking use bits per seconds and base 10 powers, the same for storage where the base 10 is the industry standard. Things change at the OS level, Linux stick with base 2 for almost anything, see df, memory pages etc.
If you look at the sar utilities even the network is reported with base 2 kilobytes.

              rxkB/s
                     Total number of kilobytes received per second.

              txkB/s
                     Total number of kilobytes transmitted per second.

looking at the code of sar (rndr_stats.c)

                render(isdb, pre, PT_NOFLAG,
                       "%s\ttxkB/s", NULL,
                       cons(sv, sndc->interface, NULL),
                       NOVAL,
                       txkb / 1024,
                       NULL);

I suppose that the "Linux" standard prevails here.