RE: memory and vxWorks based IOCs

[Mark Rivers <rivers@cars.uchicago.edu>]

Depending on the model of your CPU card you may be able to buy a memory upgrade on the used market.  I recently upgraded all of our MVME2700 CPUs from 32MB to 64MB.  That will increase their useful lifetime significantly, since we were coming close to running out of memory with 32GB on our beamline IOCs.  It cost about $600 per card, which is a lot of money for 64MB of memory today, but is a lot cheaper than a new CPU card.

 

Mark

 

 

From: tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov [mailto:tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov] On Behalf Of James F Ross
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2013 10:19 AM
To: EPICS Tech Talk
Subject: memory and vxWorks based IOCs

 

Hello everyone,
I suppose this is more a vxWorks question than an epics question, but here is the issue.
I've got a VME based IOC running here at STAR that is having memory problems.  Basically we noticed this issue as every 24-48 hours the IOC would lose communication and all GUIs associated with it would go blank.  The solution is to re-start the IOC by rebooting the VME, but doing this every day is not a good solution. 

The epics is running on vxWorks, so I can use the memShow command to show the memory usage at a given time.  I can see that as I open more and more GUIs, the memory fills up.  At least part of the cause of the loss of communication has to do with too many people opening GUIs relating to this IOC at the same time.  However, I am not certain that this is the only problem. 

What I would like is to track the memory usage over time to see if there is a time component as well as just too many GUIs being opened.  Does anyone know how to do this in vxWorks?  Get it to print its memory usage every minute or so to a log file or something similar? 
Thanks
James