Bob,
I am not here to defend our pricing models or justify why we need revenue,
but there are things that I can suggest. Before you upgrade, please check a
few things:
* Upgrade to the latest FoxAPI QF. I believe that this is V4.2.4
QF990341.
* Review the change deltas in the PI database. I've seen more than one
system brought to its knees by zero (0.0) change deltas or ones that are
much smaller than the noise in the signal. Change deltas on field
measurements should be > than the repeatability of the transmitter and on
non-field signals can be almost anything bigger than zero.
* Review the FoxAPI settings on your box. FoxAPI V4.0 has a single
read scan rate that is specified by the fastest_rsr parameter in the
/opt/fox/ais/bin/foxapi.cfg file. The default is 0.5 seconds. This default
combined with small deltas will generate a lot of "extra" work. Add the
following line to the file:
fastest_rsr=4
a setting of 4 sets the update rate on the lists to 2
seconds. Be cautious if other applications on the box use FoxAPI as this
change will effect them as well.
* In a cmdtool or VT100 window, run the following command:
vmstat 10 20
this command will report on the computer's load. The output will
resemble:
1AW51C# vmstat 5 5
procs memory page disk faults
cpu
r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr f0 m0 m1 m2 in sy
cs us sy id
0 0 0 248936 18928 0 65 6 4 6 0 1 1 0 0 0 523 672
334 4 3 93
0 0 0 245876 6916 0 3 49 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3531 544
313 0 1 99
0 0 0 245876 6916 0 0 24 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3736 539
314 0 0 99
0 0 0 245892 7052 0 90 4 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 2565 716
333 2 4 94
0 0 0 245992 7280 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 51 532
307 0 1 99
1AW51C#
The first line should be ignored. It is always wrong. The columns to
observe are:
1. swap - The amount of swap space available on your machine. This gets
used when the RAM gets full.
2. free - The amount of available RAM. If this is low, your programs
will work out of swap and that is very, very slow.
3. The numbers under page (re through sr) sholud be low. If you see
three digits you are low on RAM.
4. id (the column to the far right) shows the idle time. This will be
low if paging is required.
This should tell you pretty quickly if the machine is memory bound.
If it is, upgrade the RAM. If it is not, i.e., id is high and free is big
and page number are low, an application is consuming the time.
* Use ps -el (or top if you have it or want to get it from
www.sunfreeware.com <http://www.sunfreeware.com> ) to determine which
programs are consuming the CPU time on your box. Here's a simple test:
cd /opt ; ps -el >ps1.out ; sleep 100 ; ps -el >ps2.out ;
diff ps1.out ps2.out
Here's a sample output:
107c107
< 8 O 0 9983 4030 1 51 20 f6725010 199 pts/6
0:00 ps
---
> 8 O 0 9988 4030 1 61 20 f6725010 199 pts/6
0:00 ps
109c109,110
< 8 S 0 9961 9958 1 41 20 f63c9018 15516 9641c pts/6
0:03 aos
---
> 8 S 0 9987 9837 0 41 20 f6713668 209 f6773298 pts/7
0:00 tar
> 8 S 0 9961 9958 0 41 20 f63c9018 15516 9641c pts/6
0:03 aos
114c115
< 8 S 0 9837 4883 0 73 20 f63de980 224 f674735e pts/7
0:00 create_d
---
> 8 S 0 9837 4883 0 56 20 f63de980 224 f63de9f0 pts/7
0:00 create_d
From this, you can see that aos has accumulated 0:03 seconds of CPU
time since startup and that tar has started running. By examining the diff
output and the files you can determine who is accumulating time and how
fast.
Hope this helps - Check those deltas and fastest_rsr!
Regards,
Alex Johnson
10707 Haddington
Houston, TX 77043
713.722.2859 (office)
713.722.2700 (switchboard)
713.932.0222 (fax)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
-----Original Message-----
From: Davis, Robert N. [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 12:02 PM
To: Foxboro DCS Mail List
Subject: FW: Upgrading Foxboro Boxes
This note came to me from our Decatur plant. Any suggestions?
We are looking at a problem that is going to be experienced by other
plants
in the future. We have a Foxboro I/A system here on our Cogen plant.
We have
AW51s (A series) and V6.1 software. We recently installed the OSI PI
system
onto one of our AW51s. What was already a slow box has become almost
unusable. We have received a lot of complaints from the plant
operators -
especially about the graphic call up speed.
We have talked about upgrading the boxes to the latest AW51s (series
D or E)
to speed things up. Unfortunately we are being quoted $100,000 by
Foxboro.
What makes this worse is that we know we can buy the boxes from Sun
direct
for 30% of the Foxboro price and Foxboro are charging us $50,000 for
software licenses. Foxboro are not being very helpful at this time.
When we
proposed buying the boxes from Sun, Foxboro refused to support these
boxes.
We are wondering if it is technically possible to buy the new boxes
from Sun
and try to load the existing software on ourselves. This would mean
that we
are using the same software licenses but should get a better
performance. We
have asked Foxboro about this and been told that it is not possible
because
we need to buy new licenses from Sun. We have asked Sun about this
and they
have told us that we do not need new licenses but they do not know
if this
would work.
Does anyone have any thoughts/experience in this matter. Is this
possible or
are we missing something somewhere?
All comments gratefully received
Bob Davis
Process Control Engineer
765-477-5317---Fax 765-474-9036
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