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-rwxr-xr-x.times6
-rwxr-xr-xserved/home.html4
-rwxr-xr-xserved/styles/common.css4
-rw-r--r--served/styles/home.css2
-rw-r--r--served/words/statistic-gifs.html197
-rwxr-xr-xserved/words/writing.css17
6 files changed, 226 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/.times b/.times
index b781a20..7986788 100755
--- a/.times
+++ b/.times
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 ,1722699430,1739445155,1739445155
 .DS_Store,1716265453,1739645865,1739646135
 .times-ignore,1708577778,1708577778,1724111977
-.times,1714751011,1740909577,1740909570
+.times,1714751011,1740909645,1740909580
 readme.md,1739445155,1739445155,1739445155
 .gitignore,1739445155,1739445155,1739445157
 updateTimes.sh,1708577778,1708577778,1740776196
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ served/.DS_Store,1716265453,1739645865,1739646135
 served/about.html,1740572535,1740573730,1740573730
 served/look1_512px.png,1734785632,1734785632,1734895881
 served/valid-atom.png,1709295369,1709295369,1724135211
-served/starlight.html,1739700272,1740909559,1740909559
+served/starlight.html,1739700272,1740909559,1740909577
 served/gennysomething.gif,1740573462,1740573462,1740738464
 served/atom.xml,1721484969,1736549409,1736549409
 served/look1_512px_squash.gif,1734785650,1734785650,1734895881
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ served/words/a-really-long-week.html,1731536606,1734517744,1734517744
 served/words/.DS_Store,1731546328,1739645858,1739646135
 served/words/words.html,1739445155,1739445155,1739445156
 served/words/akkoma-postgres-migration.html,1712999241,1712999241,1724111977
-served/words/statistic-gifs.html,1740534158,1740909365,1740909365
+served/words/statistic-gifs.html,1740534158,1740909628,1740909628
 served/words/writing.css,1739445155,1740907336,1740907337
 served/words/words.css,1739445155,1739445155,1739445156
 served/words/seeding-rng-physically.html,1739445155,1739445155,1739445156
diff --git a/served/home.html b/served/home.html
index f12dd32..3c12281 100755
--- a/served/home.html
+++ b/served/home.html
@@ -21,6 +21,10 @@ style=/styles/home.css
 		<p>
 			There are living pages, updated when needed, for some <a href="things/">things/</a>.
 		</p>
+		<p style="display: none">
+			Want to see statistics for starlight, the server that runs this website?
+			Check them out at <a href="starlight.html">starlight.html</a>
+		</p>
 
 		<section id="contact">
 			<h2>Contact~,.</h2>
diff --git a/served/styles/common.css b/served/styles/common.css
index 81e5b43..5ae828e 100755
--- a/served/styles/common.css
+++ b/served/styles/common.css
@@ -119,6 +119,10 @@ code {
 		"CRSV" 0;
 }
 
+h2 code {
+	font-size: 1.4rem;
+}
+
 #nav-access {
 	/* shove it above the page and make sure it's always on top*/
 	position: absolute;
diff --git a/served/styles/home.css b/served/styles/home.css
index fd5f6b2..604308a 100644
--- a/served/styles/home.css
+++ b/served/styles/home.css
@@ -98,6 +98,6 @@ ul {
 	#banner-container {
 		/*max-width: 16rem;*/
 		grid-column: 2;
-		grid-row: 4 / 6;
+		grid-row: 5 / 7;
 	}
 }
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/served/words/statistic-gifs.html b/served/words/statistic-gifs.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..583974b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/served/words/statistic-gifs.html
@@ -0,0 +1,197 @@
+---
+template=post
+title=Statistics on Linux with /proc
+style=/styles/post.css
+style=writing.css
+
+published=2025-03-02 4:00am CST
+
+description=I want to tell you how my statistic gifs are made :)
+---
+
+<style>
+	.manlink {
+		margin-top: -1rem;
+	}
+</style>
+
+I've been wanting to make a little page for the statistics of my
+webserver <i>(the system not the program)</i>. When I started to
+research the APIs that I'd need, just on a whim one day with no
+intention to start, I got grabbed by it and knew I had to start.
+
+Check it out: <a href="/starlight.html">starlight.html</a>
+
+<h2>a <code>/proc</code> foreword</h2>
+The <code>/proc</code> filesystem, on Linux, is a sort of window into
+the kernel. It lets you view some pretty detailed information by simply
+reading some files (thanks everything-is-a-file linux).
+
+There's a lot of information about it in the man pages.
+They might all be in one big one at <code>man proc</code> but,
+like how they are on my server, they could be broken into separate pages
+for distinct sections.
+
+I have linked the relevant pages at the top of their section. It's a link
+to man7.org, which seems to be <i>the</i> source for Linux Kernel man pages
+on the internet. man7 is linked from kernel.org which lends it
+credibility at least.
+
+<h2>Memory</h2>
+
+<p class="manlink"><a href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc_meminfo.5.html">man7.org/proc_meminfo</a></p>
+
+This one isn't too hard. I open the file <code>/proc/meminfo</code> and
+look for the lines starting with <code>MemTotal</code> and <code>MemAvailable</code>
+which are the total memory and currently available memory, respectively. They
+are very well named :). For usage, I just subtract available from total.
+
+<h2>Network</h2>
+
+<p class="manlink"><a href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc_net.5.html">man7.org/proc_net</a></p>
+
+If you <code>cat /proc/net/dev</code> you can see some stats about
+your networking interfaces. This is what I parse, with some pain.
+
+I read the bytes columns from the receive and transmit sections.
+These are total counts of bytes received since boot, so you'll
+have to take two samples and subtract to get the number of bytes
+in some time-span.
+
+Looking at it in the terminal, you might assume that the separator
+between the columns was a tab character. I sure did! It is not a tab,
+but many spaces.
+
+Because of spaces-and-not-tabs
+<i>(not the tabs vs. spaces debate of usual, but with similarities)</i>, it proved
+to be a bit annoying to parse. It made me finally
+pull in a regex crate because I didn't feel like dealing with it
+at the time. Eventually&trade; I want to write a skip-arbitrarily-many-whitespace
+iterator, but for now <code>regex-lite</code> lives in my <code>Cargo.toml</code>.
+
+<h2>CPU</h2>
+
+<p class="manlink"><a href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc_stat.5.html">man7.org/proc_stat</a></p>
+
+<code>/proc/stat</code> is the least obvious of the triplet. It has more than
+just the CPU's information, but the cpu is what we're after. You'll notice many
+CPU lines probably! I'm using the one starting just "cpu" without a number
+(cpu0, cpu1, etc.) because I only have the 1 core. If I had more than one core
+it'd work similarly, the just-cpu line sums the other ones, but then it could
+show >100% usage 'cause it's per-core usage just added together.
+
+First things uh, second? To summarize from the man page:<br />
+The units of these values are <i>ticks</i>. There are <code>USER_HZ</code>
+ticks per second. On most platforms it's 100 but you can
+check the value for your system with <code>sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK)</code>.
+
+<details>
+	<summary style="font-style: italic;">small C program to check _SC_CLK_TCK :)</summary>
+	<pre><code>#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
+#include &lt;unistd.h&gt;
+int main() {
+	printf("USER_HZ is %i", sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK));
+}</code></pre>
+</details>
+
+But what columns of data do we use? From <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/3017438">this stackoverflow answer</a>
+it seems that summing the user, nice, and system columns get you the total ticks.
+The user and system make sense to me, time spent in user and system mode,
+but what on earth is nice? I sure hope it is.
+
+The Internet tells me to check <code>man nice</code>
+(<a href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/nice.1.html">man7.org/nice</a>).
+That page says that the
+nicness of a process can be adjusted to change how the kernel schedules
+that process. Making it less nice (down to -20) increases it's priority, and
+increasing it's niceness (up to 19) lowers it. I guess that makes sense. Lowering
+the niceness makes the process greedier and in want of more attention
+from the scheduler? I'm unsure how well that personification tracks to reality, but
+it helped me think about it.
+
+The nice column, then, seems to be the time spent in processes that
+would go in the user column, but they have a different priority and
+I guess differentiating that is important.
+
+Oh, but there might be more columns we want!
+There's <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/10794088">another S.O. answer</a>
+that I found while writing this that says the sixth and seventh columns should used
+as well. These are irq/softirq and are time spent servicing
+interrupts. I think it makes sense we'd want that, too.
+
+So you have all these columns&mdash;user, nice, system, irq,
+and softirq&mdash;that add together to give you the total number
+of ticks spent Doing Things since boot, and you have the number
+of ticks in a second. Can you see where I'm going with this?
+
+Yup, take two samples some time span apart, subtract the former
+from the later, and then you have how much time the processor spent
+Doing Things. You can use that and the number of ticks in your time
+span to calculate utilization. Or you just have how much actual time
+The Computer spent Doing Work which is also pretty neat. Maybe you
+can pay it an hourly wage. Is that just AWS?
+
+Something to watch out for:<br />
+apparently the numbers in <code>/proc/stat</code> can overflow and
+wrap back to zero. I don't know what size integers they are so I'm
+unsure how real of a risk that is, but it seemed worth mentioning here.
+
+<h2>So you've parsed the stats, now to graphs!</h2>
+
+My main trouble here was selecting a range that makes sense for
+the data it's representing.
+
+Again, memory was easy. There is a
+total, normally-unchanging amount of RAM, so I just use that as
+the max. Perhaps there's something to be said about zooming further
+in to see the megabyte-by-megabyte variance, but I am much more
+interested in a "how close am I to the ceiling" kind of graph. Like,
+would I hit my head if I jumped? that kind of thing.
+
+The CPU graph, though, that's very variable and a bit spiky.
+I don't <i>really</i> care what the max value was if it's a spike,
+it can go off the top for all I care, what I want to see is the
+typical usage.
+
+If I just ranged to the max then I'd have what I call The Linode
+Problem. I call it that, rather predictably, because that's what
+Linode's graphs do and it makes them kind of useless? Great, I love
+to see that spike up to 100%, but that's <i>all</i> that I can see now.
+
+So instead of max-grabbing, I sort the data and take the value that's
+<i>almost</i> max. My series are 256 samples long, so what this looked
+like was taking the 240th value in the array, getting the closest-highest
+percent, and using that as the top of the range.
+
+This <i>does</i> mean if it's <i>very</i> spiky, I get The Linode Problem
+again, but in that case I'm kind of okay with it. I sample every minute,
+so my 256 pixel long graphs are roughly 4 hours long. If it spikes more
+than 16 times in that period, perhaps that's worth looking into.
+
+Okay, CPU done. Network time! It's the same, pretty much. Where there was
+one line, there are now two. And lots more spikes! I combine the receive
+and transmit series into one <code>vec</code>, sort it, and take the 32nd
+highest value.
+
+I draw the area under the line, too, because it was nigh impossible to see
+the line when it was so.. discontinuous? We get another problem with that,
+though, where the second-drawn line-and-underfill will obscure the one
+drawn first. So then, to not overdraw an entire measurement, I try to draw
+the average-larger one first. Which is to say, I take the average of both
+series separately and draw the one with the bigger average first. That way
+the smaller one will hopefully nestle under the larger, like a baby bird
+hiding from the rain under their parents wing.
+
+<hr class="asterism-dash" />
+
+That's how the range selection works, anyway.
+
+The graphs themselves are drawn on 256x160 gif because i like gif, 256 is
+a good number, and they seem to compress better than png in this use case.
+
+One day I'd love to try and generate alternative text to describe
+the general look of the graph. "The memory usage is steady at 300MB",
+or something like "The network usage is variable, but averages 15.4kbps".
+
+That's it!<br />
+bye :)
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/served/words/writing.css b/served/words/writing.css
index 4ad23e1..82cfa91 100755
--- a/served/words/writing.css
+++ b/served/words/writing.css
@@ -67,6 +67,10 @@ img {
 	width: 100%;
 }
 
+hr {
+	margin: 0;
+}
+
 .asterism {
 	border: 0;
 	width: 100%;
@@ -80,6 +84,19 @@ img {
 	color: var(--text);
 }
 
+.asterism-dash {
+	border: 0;
+	width: 100%;
+	text-align: center;
+}
+
+.asterism-dash::after {
+	content: "—";
+	text-align: center;
+	line-height: 1rem;
+	color: var(--text);
+}
+
 #signoff {
 	display: flex;
 	width: 100%;