[douglashunter]

"I'm confused about what the smoothing is supposed to be doing"

If you have, for example, 300 data plots collected once a second for 5 minutes, and that looks too noisy when you paint your chart, you may choose to smooth the lines by aggregating the data into buckets that are larger than a second. For instance, you might choose to sum all the plots in a minute, and divide that sum by the number of plots that were in that minute, thus reducing 60 plots to one while retaining an accurate representation of your data.

When you drag that slider, you are aggregating data into larger buckets.

Good luck in your travels finding a chart library that works for your application, and if you try Rickshaw and hit any stumbling blocks, hit us up on github.

Cheers!