You’re definitely right in that I apparently misunderstood how to use minlen. I will have to tinker a bit to readjust my understanding of things.
My understanding of minlen was, if it is >1, then the node pointed to will be placed on a new rank. So my application calculates the time distance between two events, then calculates how that distance relates to the “base unit” of the graph - day, week, or month. If the base unit is “day”, and two events are more than 24h apart, the minlen should reflect that in being >1, so that the event on the new day is also on a new rank.
Similarly, when the base unit is “week”, all events within the time range of a week will share the same rank. This is an important property to receive a visual result that reflects time distances, and identical timestamps shared between individual data sets end up in the correct location in the output.
So, in my mind, the 20703 ranks were “correct”, because that is likely the number of discrete days in the graph (or at least closely related to that metric), which should also occupy distinct ranks.
That being said, I shall see if I can achieve a satisfying result, given this new information, and then I’ll return. Thanks a lot!