I tested CODA this morning with cosmics. It seems to run as usual
(which means not perfectly, but nothing I haven't seen before). In
fact, there seem to be fewer ROC sleeps; I don't know why.
Run 2193 -- cosmics trigger on RTOFs only. See no events in Runcontrol
from ER, although visual_scal reports 260Hz for PHY0. Switch monitoring
to EB, ROC, ROCr. Pick up a few thousand events, but then no more. End
Run fails. Reset, Download, ok.
Run 2194 -- Events at 250Hz or so, 120kB/s. No sleeps. End Run is
fine.
Run 2195 -- Same as 2194. >162k events. No sleeps. >10 minutes. End
Run is fine.
Run 2196 -- shorter, same as 2195. No problems.
Run 2197 -- trigger on any TOF, rate now over 400Hz, over 200kB/s. One
sleep which lasted about 1 minute, recovered by itself (which it usually
does, if you're patient). Over 144k events. End Run is fine.
Based on this, I don't think there is anything wrong with CODA, beyond
what we've all become used to:
0) Runcontrol message window shows
blastROC failed to report status in n seconds
blastROCr failed to report status in n seconds
every 10 seconds. This is normal. It goes away for a time after you
switch the Runcontrol monitoring point, but then it will come back. As
long as the event count is increasing (EB, or ER -- but don't be fooled
by EPICS+scaler events), the ROC is really up and working.
1) sometimes (even many times within one run!) one ROC or the other will
sleep, especially at data rates above 60kB/s. To wake the ROC up, you
can switch the Runcontrol monitoring point between EB, ROC and ROCr. Or
you can ping the ROCs (blrocf3 and blrocf2). I have left 2 ping
processes running in the background from an xterm on dblast07 in the
CODA screen panel. These pings occur every 5 seconds, so sleep
shouldn't last for more than 5 seconds. When a ROC is asleep, End Run
will still work.
2) Rarely, End Run will fail (once a shift or so). Then you need to
Reset, Download, before doing the usual Prestart, Go.
3) Even more rarely (a few times a week?), there will be no events, End
Run will fail, and step 2) doesn't help for the next run. You can try
getting out of all the CODA processes (EB, ER, ET, rcServer, Runcontrol)
and redoing setup. If that doesn't fix it, check the seating of the big
ribbon cables at the TS and the back of each FASTBUS crate. Power-cycle
the FB crates. Wait for the ROCs to reboot, then Reset, Download.
Please, if you are having problems with CODA beyond this, I need to
know details. "CODA dies" or "stops taking data" is not enough
information. Is a ROC asleep? That is, do you get events flowing again
by changing the monitoring point? Did End Run fail? Which device
failed to End (EB, ER, ROC, ROCr)? Did you have to kill all CODA
processes? Are the visual scalers showing physics triggers, but you see
no events in Runcontrol? Did you check with a scope that the Common
Strobe (C input to the TS) is present and overlaps with the Physics
Trigger??
Karen
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