I've got a user parameter on one of my systems which reports the CPU frequency in MHz to the server so I can monitor clock frequency changes. The server is then configured to graph that as Hz, multiplying it by 1,000,000 to get it to the correct value.

I was therefore rather suprised that the agent reports 1600.00 for the frequency but the web gui graphs it as 1.49GHz. It was only after some thought that I realised that 1.49 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 is actually 1.6 billion.

Poking around in the web interface PHP files, it appears that Zabbix defaults to using 1024 for the 'kilo' divider, and has a couple of special case unit names where it uses 1000 instead.

Surely this is backwards? Most uses of 'kilo' should be 1000, with only memory sizes (and derivatives) using 1024, so I'd imagine it should really be using 1000 by default and 1024 for the special case names... or, better yet, allowing you to pick 1000 or 1024 on a per item basis. The difference isn't so obvious for small numbers, but when you get into the billions it's very, very obvious.

I did look for any other bug reports related to this but the search didn't find any reference to 1024 or kilo.