counter

counter add, counter help, counter increment, counter list, counter reset, counter unlink — manage counters

counter add { counter_name } { delta }

counter help

counter increment { counter_name }

counter list

counter reset { counter_name }

counter unlink { counter_name }

**Configuration Change. ** This feature is available starting from Momentum 3.1.

Both Sieve and Lua make use of generic counters. These commands display and manipulate counters.

The counter list command displays the statistics for all counters. Find sample output below.

All content scanning modules record statistics on scanned virus and spam volume metrics. These metrics are exposed via the counters subsystem and can be viewed using the counter list command.

The counter increment command increments the specified counter by one. For example, you can increment the /vendor/sample counter shown in “counter list” by issuing the command counter increment /vendor/sample .

The counter add command increments the specified counter by the value of the second parameter.

The counter unlink deletes a counter and the counter reset sets a counter to 0.

The counter help command displays a brief description of each command.

Momentum generic counters are scalable low latency counters that are identified by a unique path in a counter namespace. This namespace may be exported to other facilities for visualization, analysis and more. The namespace hierarchy is defined as follows.

• / – reserved for Message Systems use.

• /sieve – reserved for Sieve counters.

• /vendor/<name> – reserved for vendors. For example, vendor Foo may reserve /vendor/foo.

• /site/<name> – reserved for clients. For example, client CompanyA may use /site/companya.

Both Sieve and Lua counters are integrated into this system. A Sieve counter is an alias to /sieve/type/[phase/]name where "type" may have the values 5xx, 4xx or informational. The phase field is optional and represents the SMTP phase the counter is associated with. The name field is the name of the Sieve counter. For example, the Sieve counter spool_phase1:ec_reject spool (5xx) is an alias to /sieve/5xx/spool_phase1/ec_reject spool. Strict semantics mean all counter handles will update the same value in memory. Relaxed means all counter handles update their own values in memory. Those values are then aggregated when someone does a read operation on the counter.

Counters may be opened with either msys.counter.STRICT or msys.counter.RELAXED semantics. Strict semantics mean all counter handles will update the same value in memory. Relaxed means all counter handles update their own values in memory. Those values are then aggregated when someone does a read operation on the counter. If a counter value is updated mostly in a single thread on one processor then the STRICT semantics are recommended. Also, for policy-level logic, STRICT semantics are recommended as the counters may later be augmented to support atomic fetch and phi operations. If a counter is often updated across different threads or processors then RELAXED semantics are recommended. STRICT semantics provide almost perfect read scalability and RELAXED semantics provide almost perfect update scalability. For a graphic representation see below:

**Note about “Counter semantics”. ** In this figure update refers to increment and add operations. The sample machine used two Intel® Xeon® CPU E5530 at 2.4GHz with four cores each.

“sieve Management Using Console Commands”, ec_inc_counter