Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Kenneth Evans, Jr." <[email protected]> · Sun, 3 Oct 2004 08:23:22 -0500

I think the portable server a.k.a. the Channel Access Server [CAS] is quite
robust (this owing to Jeff's efforts).  In addition, it has features, such
as supporting EPICS_CAS_INTF_ADDR_LIST, that the original server does not
have.

I have been responsible for at least two portable server applications, the
Gateway (http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/extensions/gateway/index.php) and
CaSnooper (http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/extensions/caSnooper/index.php).
Both are somewhat widely used and neither seems to have significant
problems.  Our main Gateway, in fact, as of last week had run for over four
months without restarting, regularly handling on the order of 10 - 20
thousand process variables.  You should use at least 3.14.6 to get this
stable performance.

It turns out I am scheduled to give a talk on Channel Access Servers on
October 8 as part of our current EPICS Training Series
(http://www.aps.anl.gov/aod/bcda/epicsgettingstarted/index.html).  The
presentation (yet to be written ;-) will be available from that page.  The
talks are also scheduled to be available on streaming video from that page,
but are not there yet.  Hopefully this will be helpful.

You should be aware that an alternative to writing portable servers is to
use soft IOCs (IOCs that run on workstations).  These use the standard EPICS
database and iocCore and act like IOCs (because they are IOCs).  It may be
easier to implement a soft IOC than a portable server, as much more has been
done for you and the documentation is much more extensive.  See the EPICS
pages (http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/) for more information.

	-Ken

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System