There are a large amount of subtle tradeoffs around the bucketing scheme (log, vs. log-linear, base) and memory layout (sparse, dense, chunked) the amount of configurability in the histogram space (circllhist, DDSketch, HDRHistogram, ...). A good overview is this discussion here:
As for the circllhist: There are no knobs to turn. It uses base 10 and two decimal digits of precision. In the last 8 years I have not seen a single use-case in the operational domain where this was not appropriate.
Right - it’s why I said “in the abstract.” You could do it and still have a log-linear format. Base 10 works great for real-world distributions.
Thanks for making and ossing circllhist. I’ve been close by to the whole “what’s the OTel histogram going to be” discussion for the last many months and learned a lot from that. That discussion is what introduced me to circllhist and got me using them.
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...
As for the circllhist: There are no knobs to turn. It uses base 10 and two decimal digits of precision. In the last 8 years I have not seen a single use-case in the operational domain where this was not appropriate.