Re: EPICS performance test/benchmark

[Jiro Fujita <jiro@creighton.edu>]

Andrew,

I too am interested in EPICS performance test/benchmark.  I have downloaded the soft-test regression test suite, but could you please explain how to use it and how to interpret the result?

Thanks.

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Andrew Johnson <anj@aps.anl.gov> wrote:

Hi Andre,

On 2013-04-04 Andre Charbonneau wrote:
> Now I would like to do a benchmark test of EPICS on the Raspberry Pi to
> get an idea of the limits of running EPICS on that particular hardware
> and see how it compares to other system.  That would also help me to
> fine-tune the setup to get better performance.
>
> Did anyone did such tests before?  Or maybe have some pointers about
> where I should look to get started on this?

We don't really have an easy-to-use set of standard IOC database performance
tests.  You can use the ca_test program to measure and compare the CA network
performance, and there are a couple of simple performance measurement
applications in the (not often used) soft-test regression test suite.
Unfortunately we don't currently publish a tar-file of that which you can
download, you'd need to check out a local copy using Bazaar, although I can
create one for you if you get stuck doing that.  The relevant checkout command
is:
    bzr branch lp:epics-base-tests/3.14 base-tests

After checkout you'd edit the configure/RELEASE file, build the module, then
cd into the performApp and/or dbcaPerform directories and follow the README
instructions to run the tests.  Note that you have to cd into the equivalent
iocBoot/iocXxx directory to run the IOCs in each case.  Let me know if you get
stuck.

Feel free to take any code that you like from there and re-work it into a more
user-friendly format.  We really should have a standard easy-to-use IOC
performance testing application, so I'd be happy to help publish such a thing
if you would like to contribute toward one.

> By googling around I found:
>
> http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/modules/soft/realTimePerform/R1-1/testDescription.html
>
>
> But I'm not sure if this is the right way to go for what I'm trying to do.

That particular module really just tests the latency between an incoming
hardware interrupt and subsequent record processing; it's not really testing
the IOC database performance at all, and it does require specific hardware
support so I don't think it's worth your looking at it.

- Andrew
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