this is primarily a bugfix release steve wagner submitted a patch that vastly improved the efficiency of gmetad. previously, a gettimeofday() call was made for every round-robin database updated whereas gmetad 2.5.3 doesn’t require any gettimeofday() calls. time is gathered from the XML. this may help users who experience gaps in their gmetad images. federico sacerdoti and tomas ogren (stric) tracked down a serious bug in gmond that could lead to stack corruption for long metric names (>32 characters). federico also made the cleanup thread more efficient and fixed a bug which prevented expired metrics from being deleted. martin knoblauch and jack perdue provided code to strengthen HPUX support. phil radden fixed a bug on linux which caused bytes_in and bytes_out to occasionally be incorrectly reported.