Re: IOC Boot Time

[dalesio@luke.atdiv.lanl.gov (Bob Dalesio)]

We ran tests on this a long time ago on the HKV2F boards, but I believe the
same is true today -

The time to boot is not affected as much by the size of the file as it
is by the number of files. If you link all of the database code before loading,
then the time is about three times faster than loading drvsup, devsup, and
recsup seperately.

If you have severe time restrictions on reboot, we have used battery backedup
boards in the VME crate for reboot - this takes a few seconds. Rozelle Wright
did that work and can give details.

We are pushing toward loading ASCII databases in future releases to minimize the
affects of changing the database record structure and provide more flexibility
in defining databases. The preliminary benchmarks show that this takes about
25% more time. This takes advantage of not reporting fields that are the default
value - so only a subset of the fields are included. There was a discussion
held on this perhaps more than a year ago and this was deemed a reasonable
tradeoff.

	Bob