RE: BESSRC experience with Spec/Epics

[Mark Rivers <rivers@cars.uchicago.edu>]

Guy wrote:
> Yes we have, so much so that we have largely given up using 
> epics with spec.

This is serious.  spec running on top of EPICS is critical to APS beamlines,
so we need to track this down.  Time to get out the network sniffer.

Same question I asked Pete: are these Puts or Gets and do you know what PVs
they are to?

> I didn't know this.  Is this on the client?   It would be 
> consistent with what we see.  I get the impression that the errors are
more 
> likely when spec has a large number of epics motors defined and
specifically 
> during the burst of activity that occurs when leaving spec's 'config'
screen.

I don't think this should happen, unless the IOC is running out of memory.
In some recent Python code I create 'multi-element detector' objects, which
end up connecting almost 4,000 PVs very rapidly.  I've never seen a timeout
except when running over DSL from home.  These are using the basic ca calls,
not the ezca library.

Mark