log files, restarting before month end 9am rollover

[sfws]

Yesterday evening, I noticed the pressure was falling rapidly, and started up Cumulus build 1051 (it logs at 5 minute intervals, whilst Fine Offset logs at 15 minutes intervals to hold a whole month in its memory) to track the pressure. It went low enough to update both the monthly and annual extremes.
I closed Cumulus and my PC and went to bed.
Heavy rain woke me just after 1am, and I wondered if the rain rate would also be a new extreme.
So I restarted Cumulus and left it running (going back to bed), I looked again when I got up and at 07:35 the 'thismonth' web tags were filled with nulls as if a end-month rollover had happened, but <#metdate> contained October. 'thismonth' correctly reported the barometric low extreme as 4am 1st Nov, (not yet then in dayfile, so that part of rollover had not happened), but most maximums were -999 and minimums +999 and all dates were 1 November.
I have a 9am roll-over. I tried to restore the October extremes by using the editor in Cumulus to copy in from the current log, and noticed that for times midnight to 9am the same value and time could be seen in the dayfile and the log file, but the date was X in the former and X+1 in the latter.

[steve]

If you seldom run Cumulus, and there isn't enough data in the logger to fill in the gap back to when it was last closed down, then you will get poor results. It's not clear to me from what you've said whether that is the case. But it shouldn't cause the problem with the rollover that you've described. Could you zip up the diags folder and attach it, please?

I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are still inconsistencies with the dates when using the 'automatic' features of the editors if you have an 0900 rollover. It's something that I need to look at, but hopefully it's not often an issue as the editors are only for when things go wrong.

[sfws]

Steve
Sorry to be unclear - I now don't think it has any connection with month end. What the diags reveal is that apparently there was a blip on my computer, and Cumulus shut (8) and reopened (9) without its usual clean close down - I'm sure that caused the problem, and I could have reused your midnight backup feature if I'd noticed to rerun from an earlier point. You can probably use your time more usefully on something else, but I've zipped the 3 diags indicated above.

[steve]

There's no indication of any problem there at all, the restart between logs 8 and 9 looks clean (whatever the reason for it was). I think the problem probably is related to month end. I suspect a bug with the 0900 rollover setting if you start Cumulus between midnight and 0900 on the first of month where it doesn't do the usual date correction associated with an 0900 rollover, and doesn't think the month.ini data is for the current month. Note the difference between the 01:12 start up:

01/11/2012 01:12:23.953 : Set Default Monthly Highs And Lows
01/11/2012 01:12:23.953 : Read month.ini file
01/11/2012 01:12:23.953 : month.ini is for this month
01/11/2012 01:12:23.961 : Set Default Yearly Highs And Lows
01/11/2012 01:12:23.961 : Read Year.ini file
01/11/2012 01:12:23.961 : Year.ini is for this Year

and the 01:20 start up

01/11/2012 01:20:47.225 : Set Default Monthly Highs And Lows
01/11/2012 01:20:47.225 : Read month.ini file
01/11/2012 01:20:47.226 : Set Default Yearly Highs And Lows
01/11/2012 01:20:47.226 : Read Year.ini file
01/11/2012 01:20:47.226 : Year.ini is for this Year

So actually the bug is probably that when it closes between midnight and 0900 on the first of the month, it writes today's date into month.ini when it should be writing yesterday's date. When it starts up again the check on the month fails (it's correctly looking for October in this case, and gets November).

The end result is that those monthly values that don't get updated until the end of the day will have default values until the end of the day. There aren't actually many of those, though, so I'd have expected most of the items to have been assigned values, albeit incorrect ones ignoring most of the month of October.

[sfws]

(deleted)

[steve]

It's an easy fix, I'll put it in the next build.