Hi Mike,
We are working on this task here, in NSLS-II, in the context of the next version
of Channel Archiver. You can learn about the approach from the recent EPICS
meeting:
http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/meetings/2013-10/
In short, the new version allows to use HDF5 for storing the conventional
time series of dbr data types and access them with the EPICS 4 RPC interface.
As a result, it creates a common platform for supporting images and complex
data types. Tentatively, we expect to release the “classical” version together
with the corresponding CSS plug-in in the end of November. The support of
images however would require the development of a new writer and reader.
-Nikolay
Hello,
We would like to archive data from cameras (grabbed by EPICS IOC with area detector) with BEAUTY archiver. We have prepared testing setup with 1 camera (512x512 img, 25 FPS, grayscale), BEAUTY archiver, and MySQL db. Each
block is running on independent computer, interconnection is over 1GB lan. The network traffic measured on the output of the EPICS IOC is
~6MB/s. The image can be displayed by Control System Studio intensity graph without problems.
I have also added following param to the BEAUTY configuration file:
org.csstudio.platform.libs.epics/max_array_bytes=300000
because it was complaining about the size of the incoming image.
The memory available for the Java programs is set to 2GB by OS Environmental variable.
When we start the archiver we can see that BEAUTY consumes all available resources (2GB of RAM and 99% CPU) in ~5s and then it crashes. When we changed the PV to be scanned every 5s then the BAUTY maintain to run consuming ~1GB of memory,
and ~20% CPU and write duration ~240s.
Thus I would like to ask if BEUATY is suitable for the archiving of images from camera or if I am doing something wrong…? Can anyone help me with this?
Cheers,
Mike