msys.counter.open

msys.counter.open — Create a counter object

msys.counter.open(counter_path, semantics);

For performance it is always recommended that counter handles be used rather than strings.

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.

• /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.

Lua counters are integrated into this system. 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 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.

For a code example see “msys.counter.read example”.

Enable this function with the statement require('msys.counter');.

msys.counter.reset, msys.counter.add, msys.counter.inc, msys.counter.unlink