Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Mon, 11 Jun 2012 09:41:55 -0500

Hi Michael,

On 2012-06-11 [email protected] wrote:
> 
> 1. The server is vxWorks 5.5.1 and EPICS 3.14.11

> 3. The ethernet connection is horribly horribly overloaded (100MBit link),
>  EPICS would like to deliver far more image frames than the network will
>  permit

> 5. At some random point during operation the number of IOC connections
>  ($(IOC):CA:CNX as reported by vxStats) starts climbing steadily.

What is the CPU load on the IOC at this time?  Does the CPU have any idle time 
at all?  Can you run Spy to find out which threads are getting any work done?

Also, are you running a name-server for the gateway, or is it relying on UDP 
broadcasts for name resolution?

> 7. Running `casr 2` takes forever (well, several minutes), the connection
>  is over a 9600 baud serial line.  Of the 8697 channels, the same PV is
>  reported over and over and over and over again (it's a simple camera
>  STATUS provided by the asyn driver).
> 
> 8. After `casr 2` has completed, the bogus channels have gone away:

> Very odd.  Any thoughts?

Your 'casr 2' is being run at a much higher priority than the other Channel 
Access activities.  I suspect your CPU is too busy handling higher priority 
operations to spend any time actually running the low-level CA threads that 
communicate with client.

UDP name lookups normally happen in the lowest priority CA thread, so the IOC 
/should/ stop accepting new client connections if the CPU gets overloaded 
because the name resolver task never gets a chance to run.  However if the 
gateway uses a name-server instead of UDP broadcasts this natural throttling 
will not be happening and I could see your symptoms occurring as a result.

Does this help explain what might be going on?

- Andrew
-- 
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System