Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Mark Rivers" <[email protected]> · Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:27:51 -0600

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the response.

Here is the output of all env settings that start with the string EPICS,
before I manually set EPICS_CAS_BEACON_ADDR_LIST:

$ printenv | grep EPICS
EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST=NO
EPICS_HOST_ARCH=win32-x86
EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST=localhost 164.54.160.255
EPICS_DISPLAY_PATH=C:\EPICS\adls\
EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES=10000000

If I run with just those env settings I get the following message when I
boot the IOC:

The CA server's beacon address list was empty after initialization?

If I add the env you suggested so they now look like this:

$ printenv | grep EPICS
EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST=NO
EPICS_CAS_BEACON_ADDR_LIST=164.54.160.255
EPICS_HOST_ARCH=win32-x86
EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST=localhost 164.54.160.255
EPICS_DISPLAY_PATH=C:\EPICS\adls\
EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES=10000000

Then when I start the IOC I don't get the message about the empty beacon
address list.

This is a new problem with 3.14.10.  I run identical IOCs built with
3.14.8.2 and I don't get that error message with exactly the same
environment settings.

However, even though the error message is gone the performance is only
marginally improved, if at all.

Here is the result with EPICS_CAS_BEACON_ADDR_LIST set:

******************************
Windows IOC (3.14.10), Windows medm client (built with 3.14.9) on same
PC.

Stop IOC, wait 10 seconds, restart IOC.  
Time for medm to reconnect all channels: less than 10 seconds.

Stop IOC, wait 15 minutes, restart IOC.
Time for medm to reconnect first channel: 10 seconds
Time for medm to reconnect all channels: 4 minutes

The differences from my previous test (when I had the CA server beacon
address error):

The time for the very first channel to reconnect was reduced from 60
seconds to 10 seconds.  I am not sure how reproducible this is.

The time for all channels to connect was reduced from 4 minutes and 25
seconds to 4 minutes.  Again, this may not be a statistically
significant improvement.

Thus, even with EPICS_CAS_BEACON_ADDR_LIST set the performance is really
bad.  And I am not the only one seeing it, Lewis Muir reported similar
long reconnection times earlier this afternoon.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Johnson [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:47 PM
To: Mark Rivers
Cc: Jeff Hill; epics
Subject: Re: Very slow reconnection to medm after IOC reboot

On Thursday 22 January 2009 15:32:47 Mark Rivers wrote:
> I noticed that when I start win32-x86 IOCs built with 3.14.10 I get
the
> following message just after iocInit:
>
> *******
> The CA server's beacon address list was empty after initialization?
> *******
>
> I do not get this message when running the identical IOC built with
> 3.14.8.2.
>
> Is this significant?  Why am I getting this message?

Highly, it means that the IOC is not sending out any CA beacons at all,
which 
explains why the clients are not reconnecting to it immediately.  Try
setting 
EPICS_CAS_BEACON_ADDR_LIST on the IOC to your 164.54.160.255 broadcast 
address, although it should default to the value of EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST
if not 
set so I don't understand why it's ignoring that (unless you have other
env 
settings for the IOC that you haven't told us about).

- Andrew
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harold Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System