Option to disable help text to save ~40 % bandwith

[JsBergbau]

Host operating system: output of uname -a

Linux thesystem 5.10.0-13-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.106-1 (2022-03-17) x86_64 GNU/Linux

node_exporter version: output of node_exporter --version

node_exporter command line flags

No commandline flags

Are you running node_exporter in Docker?

No

When browsing /metrics there are a lot of lines starting with "# HELP"
As far as I see these lines are just for human explanation.

node_exporter gzips the output before sending via http. This gives in my case 10837 bytes file size. (wget /metrics and then gzip metrics)
When using cat metrics | grep -v "# HELP" > metricsOpt to remove all lines with HELP text and then gzipping it results in a filesize of only 6906 bytes.

So by disabling help text you can save almost 40 % bandwith. With a scrape interval of 15s this saves about 22 MB per day and server. So if you monitor 20 servers this saves about 26 GB per month traffic (traffic of node_exporter host and traffic of prometheus scraping server).

Maybe even "# TYPE" could be disabled which results then in 5837 bytes per scrape.

What did you expect to see?

What did you see instead?

[discordianfish]

It's part of prometheus metrics model, not something we can just disable.

[Daniel-Nashed]

Resource usage is a good point. Even this is hopefully a local connection, the HELP text isn't really needed in most cases.
The TYPE information is arguable.

Saving resources is a valid topic today!

Is there any news about this request. Maybe new request?

[SuperQ]

Prometheus uses gzip encoding by default, so this doesn't actually save that much bandwidth.

The math in the original post is inaccurate.