Re: memory and vxWorks based IOCs

[James F Ross <james.falconer.ross@gmail.com>]

Thanks all for the responses!

I'm planning on trying to limit memory usage, eventually instituting an online version of the GUI so that people can go there if they just want to check the values rather than opening new GUIs.  

I'll also look into using a gateway on one of our linux machines.   Does the gateway just keep the variable values updated from the IOC, while everything (GUIs, caget, etc) gets the values from the gateway?  How did you (John) set that up for the MVME 162?  Mine is a 167 but it should be useable in at least a similar way. 
Thanks!
James

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 2:49 PM, John Dobbins <john.dobbins@cornell.edu> wrote:

James,

At one point I had a similar problem. I had an IOC running on a MVMVE162 CPU with 4 Megs. It ran fine but as clients connected it ran out of memory. In that case I was able to arrange to serve those PVs through a gateway running on a Linux machine. The load the VME CPU was small and constant.

John Dobbins

On 01/29/2013 02:39 PM, Mark Rivers wrote:

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