Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"[email protected]" <[email protected]> · Tue, 24 Jul 2018 05:46:43 +0000

Hi Mark,

Yes we have a DEC and PPU. The IOC is running on the PPU and it is that ramdisk that is filling. FURKA is doing its job as you describe, we are not running GRIMSEL since we want to store the images in HDF. A neighbouring beamline I22 has exactly the same hardware configuration and version of the driver and has no issues (all other Pilatus beamlines here use FURKA and GRIMSEL only).

We are seeing no errors in the logs.

I'll try the extra diagnostics as you suggest (in the coming shutdown).

Many thanks,

giles.

________________________________
From: Mark Rivers <[email protected]>
Sent: 23 July 2018 14:02:45
To: Knap, Giles (DLSLtd,RAL,TEC); Tech Talk
Cc: Rey, Isabella (Tessella,RAL,DIA); Williams, Scott (DLSLtd,RAL,SCI)
Subject: Re: B21 Areadetector

Hi Giles,

What is the Pilatus hardware configuration?  Is this a system with both a DEC and a PPU computer, where the detector saves to the DEC ramdisk, and then their FURKA daemon copies the files to the PPU ramdisk?  If so, is areaDetector running on the PPU and reading from the PPU ramdisk?

I think the easiest way to debug this is to add some additional debugging here in NDPluginFile.cpp

    getIntegerParam(NDFileDeleteDriverFile, &deleteDriverFile);
    if ((status == asynSuccess) && deleteDriverFile) {
        pAttribute = pArrayOut->pAttributeList->find("DriverFileName");
        if (pAttribute) {
            status = pAttribute->getValue(NDAttrString, driverFileName, sizeof(driverFileName));
            if ((status == asynSuccess) && (strlen(driverFileName) > 0)) {
                status = remove(driverFileName);
                if (status != 0) {
                    asynPrint(this->pasynUserSelf, ASYN_TRACE_ERROR,
                              "%s::%s: error deleting file %s, error=%s\n",
                              driverName, functionName, driverFileName, strerror(errno));
                }
            }
        }
    }

Note that it already prints a message if remove() fails.  You could also print a message prior to the call to remove() to see if it is indeed calling that for every file.  If it is then I can think of a few possible problems:

- remove() is silently failing (assuming you have looked for the error messages if it fails)

- FURKA is confused and is copying the file again from the DEC to the PPU again after the file was deleted

Mark

________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2018 5:08 AM
To: Tech Talk
Cc: Mark Rivers; [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: B21 Areadetector

Hello,

We are using the Areadetector 2-6 and ADPilatus 2-1 at Diamond's B21 beamline. Everything works fine except that the ramdisk keeps filling up.

The driver is writing images to the ramdisk and the HDF5 plugin is being used to write the data to our user folders. The HDF5 plugin has DeleteDriverFile enabled and the driver XML attributes file contains a DriverFileName entry. This does result in some percentage of the TIFF files being deleted as images are committed to HDF but not all of them.

For example in a 620 image acquisition with 3 second exposures, a little over 200 were deleted and the rest remain on the ram disk. Another example of 10 frames at 1 second exposure varied from 2 to 8 files being deleted.

Has anyone seen a similar issue?

Thanks,

giles

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System