Thread: Saving data into file and computing average

Hello,

I have a simple program that reads temperature, humidity and some other data from server every 10 seconds. Together it is 8 float numbers. This way i see in realtime the temperature, humidity and other parameters. But now i would also like to see history of this data. For instance, i see that the temperature right now is 28C, but i am interested in seeing what was the average of last 24 hours. Or maybe average since it started measuring it.

Now solution to this is very simple. Write this 8 floats into file every 10 seconds and then just sum all the numbers and divide by the number of lines. The problem is that in just 1 day, i will get 8640 lines of data, that means 69120 float numbers. I am running this program from my main computer where i also do other things like an occasional video game. And somehow it seems that summing and dividing such a huge amount of numbers will crank up my cpu and eat a lot of ram. Or am i mistaken ?

What would be the best solution for this problem. Again, i am ok with just the average of last 24 hours, or maybe last 7 days. I want the program to be as lighweight as possible, without burning huge amount of cpu.

Originally Posted by Norm

Try it and see what happens. Work on fixing a problem when it is found.

Alright, ur right. I will try the brute method just out of curiosity, to see how much resources it takes, might not take much at all. But after that i think i got a solution. I will simply store values in array in a program and only write to file occasionaly. Lets say i measure values every 10 seconds. That means 6 lines per minute, 360 lines per hour. I could only write to file every hour and write down the average i get from that hour (360 lines in an array). In the meanwhile i will still gladly take any pointers, i mean programs do that all the time, log things, view data, etc. So there must be an efficient way to do that.