I'm thinking about doing a second post with some actual code (some parts may be specific to Python, Django, and Celery) if anyone is interested.
I personally would love to see the code for these and other use cases.
Also, out of curiosity, what do you use to render the actual charts? I'm working on an analytics package and can't decide on a charting engine that is clientside and reasonably performant.
Eventually we settled on using Flot, which is a canvas-based charting solution. We made some changes to the core Flot code with some plugins to do things like change line color and fill on hover, but overall vanilla Flot served 90% of our needs.
Because Canvas is essentially a bitmap, number of data points have much less impact on the drawing layer.
Of note, we still use Raphael for pie charts, because, well, they look better and aren't affected by mass data point numbers.
flot is what I settled on, too, but performance with a lot of datapoints was not so great. Maybe it was just too much data. Also, the timeline view was really annoying, but JS' Date function are to blame for that. But with Flash out of the question and Raphael even slower, I suppose it's the best option for now.
If your canvas is only, say, 400 pixels wide, then any time series datapoints more then 400 will get lost -- there's simply not enough pixels to display them accurately. As such, you can use a resolution function to reduce that down to 400.
I also found it hard to decide on a resolution function for analytics. Do we show the maximum of a time range? The average? Median? Min and max?
1. showing the different kinds of applications people are using redis for;
2. as individual anecdotes that are slowly-but-surely adding up to real data.
If I remember, guys at bump did their own client in different language.