Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hinko Kocevar <[email protected]> · Fri, 27 May 2011 08:42:53 +0200

Dear Mark,

On 05/26/2011 08:02 PM, Mark Rivers wrote:

Hi Hinko,

You don't say so explicitly, I assume that you are using the standard
asyn device support, and that the ring buffer you are referring to is
the one in that device support?

Yes, and yes. It is SoftIOC running on Linux system, on ARM hardware.

I'm not creating any ring buffers myself.

Even if we manage to 'disable' the processing inside the device driver

(in terms that no new data is written to record buffers, I/O intr
SCANing still active), it takes quite some time to process all the
pending requests already in the ring buffers for the corresponding

record.

How many records are involved?  By default each record only has 10
elements in its ring buffer, so each record would process at most 10
times before the ring buffer was empty.  This should be quite fast,
unless you have very many records in this state.

We are capturing array of data with bi record on I/O intr in a local

EPICS buffer. BI record has FLNK to a waveform record that holds the

actual data for PV - 8 PV are FLNKed in a sequence. Size of the buffer

is 30000 integers.

There is no way to tell it to flush the buffer.

Thanks for clarifying this.

However, you can decrease the size of the ring buffer, down to a single
element if you want.  The ring buffer default size is 10 values, but
this can be changed on a per-record basis by setting the dbInfo string
"FIFO" to a different value.  In your case you could set the value to
"1".  The disadvantage of this is that if there are several callbacks in
rapid succession the record will only process on the last value, it will
not process with the other values.  This may be OK in your case.

Right, this might be just what we are looking for.

Our data is arriving quite fast, at 10Hz and the goal is to process the

raw data internally in the EPICS and provide the output on some EPICS

PVs. Processing of the data has significant impact on the CPU usage.

Several other PVs (some single value, some array) need to updated on at

each 100 ms interval. There is no use for data that is not delivered to

user (via PV), hence we can discard it.

Along with this FIFO modification part, we might reconsider to implement

some parts of our IOC in different way to avoid this congestion stuff

all together.

Thank you!

Hinko

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Hinko Kocevar
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2011 4:06 AM
To: EPICS tech-talk
Subject: record ring buffer flushing

Hi all,

We are running EPICS 3.14.10 on ARM based system. Our device driver is
using asyn driver.

There are several records that are processed on I/O intr SCAN. Sometimes

the I/O rate is quite high and the system load (CPU) goes over the top,
with high (>  3.0) loadavg. When this happens IOC is sluggish to respond
to any CA requests.

Even if we manage to 'disable' the processing inside the device driver
(in terms that no new data is written to record buffers, I/O intr
SCANing still active), it takes quite some time to process all the
pending requests already in the ring buffers for the corresponding
record.

Only then can we successfully use the CA to set/get any other PV on the
IOC, and not worry about the delayed response and/or timeouts.

Is there a way to tell IOC or a PV record to forget the pending
events/requests in its ring buffer (eg. some kind of flush)?

This way we could be sure that the IOC will be responding in timely
fashion, when we try to access some PV, and avoid waiting for the ring
buffer to empty by itself..

Has anyone dealt with similar situation?

Any comments and suggestions are welcomed!

Thank you,
Hinko

--
Hinko Kocevar
Technical support software engineer
Instrumentation Technologies
Velika pot 22, SI-5250 Solkan - Slovenia
T:+386 5 3352600, F:+386 5 3352601
mailto: [email protected]

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System