Shrinking the results file to generate graphs using Excel

Here is an example of running swingbench using the clarbench client, and redirecting the results to the file
results_400users_aix_run2_phase1.txt and the error log to swing.err

bash-3.2$./charbench -c swingconfig.xml -a -v users,tpm,tps,resp > results_400users_aix_run2_phase1.txt 2> swing.err

This run was run for a period of 24 hours which generated a result file with 86279 lines
-rw-r--r--    1 oracle   oinstall    2523482 Aug 21 13:58 results_400users_aix_run2_phase1.txt

Author  :        Dominic Giles
Version :        2.4.0.764

Results will be written to results.xml.

Time            Users   TPM     TPS     Response
1:58:42 PM      0       0       0       0
1:58:43 PM      0       0       0       0
1:58:44 PM      0       0       0       0
1:58:45 PM      0       0       0       0
..........    .    .    .    .
..........    .    .    .    .
..........    .    .    .    .
..........    .    .    .    .
1:58:37 PM      398     37324   443     518
1:58:38 PM      398     37297   783     518
1:58:39 PM      398     37519   849     518
1:58:40 PM      398     37622   644     518
1:58:41 PM      398     37740   748     518
1:58:42 PM      398     37806   501     518
1:58:43 PM      -1      37787   781     518

Completed Run.


The problem I found with was that when I tried to create open the results with Excel spreadsheeti, Excel did not
like it as it had far more number of lines than what it would like.

So one way to get around this is to shrink the file. You see that there is a line entry for every second, and
this could definitely be reduced ie. we use 1 data line for every 10 lines.

This can be done with a simple perl script. What this scripts does is read the source file and transfers every
10th line to the shrunk file 

#!/usr/bin/perl # # Usage: ./shrink_results.pl <source_file> <shrunk_file> # $source_file=$ARGV[0]; $destin_file=$ARGV[1]; if ( ! open RESULT, "<$source_file") {         usage();         die "The result file does not exist!";         exit (1);         } open SHRUNK, ">$destin_file" or die "Cannot open file the save the shrunk result s.\n"; sub usage {         print STDERR "Usage: ./shrink_results.pl result_file shrunk_file\n"; } my $lnum = 1; my $multi = 1; while ($line = <RESULT>) {         chomp($line);         if ($lnum == 10*$multi) {                 print SHRUNK "$line\n";                 $multi++;         }         $lnum++; } close SHRUNK; close RESULT;

bash-3.2$ ./shrink_results.pl results_400users_aix_run2_phase1.txt results_400users_aix_run2_phase1_shrunk.txt

This created a shrunk file with only 8627 lines:
bash-3.2$ ls -l results_400users_aix_run2_phase1*.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 oracle   oinstall    2523482 Aug 21 13:58 results_400users_aix_run2_phase1.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 oracle   oinstall     252333 Aug 23 22:25 results_400users_aix_run2_phase1_shrunk.txt

Excel liked the new shrunk file, and the graphs were created.