Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

John Dobbins <[email protected]> · Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:56:14 -0500

James,

Im may case I was able to rename the PVs on the VME IOC. Then in a soft

IOC on a linux I put records which had the old known names but

fetched/put their data from/to the renamed VME IOC PVs.

If you were to use an EPICS Gateway you would move the VME IOC to

another subnet (so it is no longer visible on your EPIC subnet) and add

another network interface to a machine on your EPICS subnet. You could

then run an EPICS Gateway on this machine which would serve the shielded

PVs onto your regular EPICS subnet. The Gateway is simple to build and

configure.

John

On 01/29/2013 03:00 PM, James F Ross wrote:

Thanks all for the responses!

I'm planning on trying to limit memory usage, eventually instituting an
online version of the GUI so that people can go there if they just want
to check the values rather than opening new GUIs.

I'll also look into using a gateway on one of our linux machines. Does
the gateway just keep the variable values updated from the IOC, while
everything (GUIs, caget, etc) gets the values from the gateway? How did
you (John) set that up for the MVME 162? Mine is a 167 but it should be
useable in at least a similar way.
Thanks!
James

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 2:49 PM, John Dobbins <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    James,

    At one point I had a similar problem. I had an IOC running on a
    MVMVE162 CPU with 4 Megs. It ran fine but as clients connected it
    ran out of memory. In that case I was able to arrange to serve those
    PVs through a gateway running on a Linux machine. The load the VME
    CPU was small and constant.

    John Dobbins

    On 01/29/2013 02:39 PM, Mark Rivers wrote:

        Depending on the model of your CPU card you may be able to buy a
        memory
        upgrade on the used market. I recently upgraded all of our
        MVME2700 CPUs
        from 32MB to 64MB. That will increase their useful lifetime
        significantly, since we were coming close to running out of
        memory with
        32GB on our beamline IOCs. It cost about $600 per card, which is
        a lot
        of money for 64MB of memory today, but is a lot cheaper than a
        new CPU card.

        Mark

        *From:*tech-talk-bounces@aps.__anl.gov
        <mailto:[email protected]>
        [mailto:tech-talk-bounces@aps.__anl.gov
        <mailto:[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *James F Ross
        *Sent:* Monday, January 28, 2013 10:19 AM
        *To:* EPICS Tech Talk
        *Subject:* memory and vxWorks based IOCs

        Hello everyone,
        I suppose this is more a vxWorks question than an epics
        question, but
        here is the issue.
        I've got a VME based IOC running here at STAR that is having memory
        problems. Basically we noticed this issue as every 24-48 hours
        the IOC
        would lose communication and all GUIs associated with it would
        go blank.
        The solution is to re-start the IOC by rebooting the VME, but
        doing this
        every day is not a good solution.

        The epics is running on vxWorks, so I can use the memShow command to
        show the memory usage at a given time. I can see that as I open
        more and
        more GUIs, the memory fills up. At least part of the cause of
        the loss
        of communication has to do with too many people opening GUIs
        relating to
        this IOC at the same time. However, I am not certain that this
        is the
        only problem.

        What I would like is to track the memory usage over time to see
        if there
        is a time component as well as just too many GUIs being opened. Does
        anyone know how to do this in vxWorks? Get it to print its
        memory usage
        every minute or so to a log file or something similar?
        Thanks
        James

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System