Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Chris Payne <[email protected]> · Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:31:43 -0700

John--

We have seen response exactly like this, a relatively powerful Linux computer
"bogged down" by a single StripTool, and it was definitely made worse by 
increasing the graph window size. Our operations staff subsequently learned
the "don't do that" rule.

Since the initial problems, we have gone through many upgrades, OS, EPICS
base, extensions, and now I cannot seem to reproduce the problem on our
present consoles.

The problem was obvious on RedHat 7.2 with stock XFree86 and extensions 
compiled against 3.13.5-ish (I think) and whatever X libraries (lesstif
maybe?) were there. Hardware was dual P3 1GHz with old ATI cards.

We are now on Scientific Linux 4.2 with stock Xorg, but an NVidia driver for
the NVS400 cards we use. The extensions are compiled against 3.13.10, and the
installed libraries (openmotif 2.2.3). Hardware is a P4 3.2GHz with the
NVidia card.

I think that the upgrade to the X server and new libraries are what did it for
us, but I'm not 100% sure. How up to date are your OS and Libraries?

Cheers
Chris
--
Chris Payne			ISAC Operations Controls System Manager
"Relax Snap, this is particle physics, not rocket science."

On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 01:35:34PM -0400, John Dobbins wrote:
> We've begun using StripTool and notice that is sometimes appears to bog 
> down the computer on which it is running, i.e. the mouse responds haltingly 
> with StripTool running, there is lag in button responses,...
> 
> This is true even if StripTool is the only app running. Host is Linux.
> 
> It seems to be made worse by making the StripTool graph display larger and 
> helped by reducing the screen update rate.
> 
> Do others have this experience? I looked in the docs and searched Tech-Talk 
> but didn't see anything along these lines. Is something that can be done to 
> improve responsiveness?

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System