Tuning of the HLT/DAQ system

Tuning of the HLT/DAQ system

For the moment this is a random collection of practical hints on how to set some of the system parameters

The IGUI takes significant resources and should run on a dedicated node 
and not on one which is taking part in the test partition.

To do this, one can start the setup_daq with the -ng option.

IGUI can be started on a local machine to monitor or control a remote 
partition.

To start an IGUI on a local machine the following steps have to be done:
 - set-up the correct tdaq release;
 - set-up the TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF environment variable in the same way this 
variable has been defined for the remote partition;
 - start IGUI with the command:
     > igui_start -p partition_name

IPC related notes

IPC : ORB parameters: in tdaq-01-02-00 the correct settings are already default in the applications for RDB, MRS, local controller
         don't need to be set specially;

IPC_TIMEOUT should be set to 30s (default). No special setting is expected to be necessary.
    In case of a failure, the error message on exception: client failed to communicate with server <server_name>
    This indicates either
        - a bug in the client
        - server is very overloaded: the problem should be investigated, setting it to a higher value would only result in loosing testing time

TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF

The TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF environment supports now 3 different ways to specify the IPC initial reference. This has been done in order to use the tdaq Ssftware on the machines, which don't have a common file system mounted. All these 3 formats can be used all together at the same time. The possible reference formats are:

      1. It can point to a file, which contains the IPC initial reference. The syntax in this case is

          TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF=file:<full name of the file>

          This type of reference by obvious reasons requires a common file system.

      2. It can contain the IPC initial reference in IOR format. The syntax is

          TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF=IOR:<ior bytes>

This reference is a content of the file, which is produced by the
initial IPC server at startup. The initial IPC server can also print
this reference to the standard output if it was started with "-i-"
option.

      3. It can contain the IPC initial reference in corbaloc format. The syntax is

          TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF=corbaloc:<object address>

This type of reference can be constructed using the ipc_mk_ref
utility. This utility requires the name of the machine on which the
initial IPC server is running and the port number, which it is
listening on. This type of reference can be used if there is no
common file system on all the machines where the TDAQ applications
are running. One can use the following procedure to start the TDAQ
system in this case:

      1) run the initial IPC server on a dedicated machine with the
      specific port number:
      initial_ipc_host> ipc_server -P 12345
      2) set the TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF environment variable to the
      corbaloc address of the initial IPC server:
      any_host> export TDAQ_IPC_INIT_REF=`ipc_mk_ref
      -H initial_ipc_host -P 12345`
      3) run any application, which is using the Online Software.

The reference, which is produced by the ipc_mk_ref utility is always
the same for the fixed host and port combination. This means that is
can be even set in a database if the same host+port is always used
for the initial IPC server.

RDB

suggestion: 1 rdb server for O(50) clients, possibly up to O(100) ; therefore 1 rdb server per sub-farm
clients are Controllers, EFDsm ROS, L2SV, SFO, SFI, more? not the PTs