> real time processing of *anything* is challenging, even if it's only > updating once an hour. I write this because updating once an hour implies > you are probably looking at data spanning months, and keeping a program or > set of programs reliably running without a hiccup for months is > non-trivial. Sure, we've all got anecdotes of "my machine only needed to > be rebooted 6 months ago", but there's a difference between seeing that in > the past, and guaranteeing it for the future.
It should be obvious to anybody who has been working on computers for a while, but I still remember how surprised I was when I figured it out. (That was close to 40 years ago.) The stability of a system is strongly correlated with how often you change something. Fixing bugs is probably good. Adding features is not. It's reasonably easy to get a mature OS to stay up for a long time if you aren't asking it to do a lot of work. So get a separate PC for your data collection/control needs. Assuming your software is solid, somewhere on the scale of a month or a year, things like power and/or air-conditioning become the limiting factors. (Cleaning up or rearranging your lab may also be significant.) I've been lucky recently. My power hasn't gone out for over a year. They upgraded the transformer out front ~5 years ago. I think it was a lot flakier before then, but I don't have any data to back that up. If your power is flaky, get a UPS. Be sure to check the numbers. The typical home UPS has a small battery. It runs long enough to ride over short glitches (seconds) and/or let you cleanly save your work and shut things down (few minutes), but it won't last hours running a typical PC and display. If you are interested in long run times on a UPS, consider a low power PC. The ones I've seen are generally called "embedded". They take 1/2 to 1/3 the power of of a typical PC at 2x to 3x the cost of a refurbished PC. Via chips are popular. There are also several very low power ARM systems. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
