On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 16:31, Mark Wilkinson<[email protected]> wrote:
> Quick Q:  Will Taverna 2.1 run (usefully ;-) ) with a JVM limit of 312MB?

The default is 300MB, so I hope so!

But as pointed out - it all depends on the workflow.

Although the reference manager should reduce the memory footprint of
data compared to earlier Tavernas, you might still run out of memory
in some circumstances, depending on what combination of services
that's in your workflow. For instance if you combine BioMoby, Soaplab,
Biomart, WSDL and local workers all in the same workflow this would
use more memory than if you only used say Soaplab.


If you run workflows with larger data you can also sacrifice some
workflow execution speed by turning off data caching, in File ->
Preferences go to Data Storage and select "On-disk storage" instead of
"On-disk (with cache) storage", this means that all data produced is
written to disk immediately, with 'caching' this happens in the
background, allowing the workflow to continue executing. In some
circumstances the workflow runs so fast that it builds up too much
data waiting to be written out. We've talked about having a threshold
(depending on the amount of free memory and the size of the data) of
when the reference manager would stop caching and block until say 50%
of the cache was written out. Part of the trickiness of doing this is
that Java does not allow you directly to ask how much memory some
objects occupies, you can only do guestimates.

In this case of large data you probably also want to turn off
recording of intermediate values, under "Provenance" remove the
tickbox for "Enable provenance capture from workflow runs". As this is
currently not working very well with BioMoby this might be a good
option for you anyway.


You can also reduce the memory footprint by disabling plugins you
don't need, for instance under Advanced -> Updates and plugins you can
disable Compatibility, you would no longer be able to open Taverna 1
workflows, but you save some memory. That said Taverna shouldn't use
much memory on Taverna 1 libraries until you open a Taverna 1 workflow
for the first time, but I can't guarantee that, as the default
selection in File Open is 'All supported types' which just tries to
open as both Taverna 1 and Taverna 2.


For a specialised Taverna you can disable Services and add your own
limited plugin that has only some of the service types enabled, you
can find the dependencies added by 'Services' now by looking at
http://taverna.googlecode.com/svn/taverna/products/net.sf.taverna.t2.taverna-workbench/tags/taverna-workbench-2.1-beta-2/plugins/activities-plugin/pom.xml
- 
http://taverna.googlecode.com/svn/taverna/engine/net.sf.taverna.t2.activities/tags/activities-0.8/all-activities/pom.xml
and  
http://taverna.googlecode.com/svn/taverna/ui/net.sf.taverna.t2.ui-activities/tags/ui-activities-0.12/all-activity-uis/pom.xml

if you didn't want say Biomart support, you could make your own plugin
definition that had all of these <dependency> sections listed (you
don't need to make the intermediate modules like all-activity-ui and
activities-plugin). We originally had the plugin like that, but it
turned out it was easy to forget to add a module, so we made the
collective ones instead. Ideally there should be one plugin per
service type, but since that would mean the user would have to click
to upgrade perhaps 10-15 plugins on an update we didn't go down that
route.

(In the same way you could disable bits of the GUI by reducing the
'components' plugin - but don't turn it off, or you won't have a
workbench!)

-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester

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