1. April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Controls Group Status of the Channel Access Zippy Archiver (CZAR) B. Bevins, et. al.

2. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Outline  Status  Performance  Limitations  Development Activities  New Features  Future Plans

3. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Status  CZAR has been our production archiver for over a year.  Common History API (HAPI) supplies data to:  XARR, StripTool, ArchiveViewer  hapiget (command line tool)  TCL programs using the Combat ORB A working prototype of a TCL archive viewer was written in an afternoon!  Specialized data collection such as event- triggered mode has reduced the need for other data collection tools.  Lead developer left for private industry

4. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration TCL Archive Viewer

5. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Performance Data  37,272 signals connected  Stores about 2 GB/day  About 810 GB of data available online dating back to June 2004  253.5 billion data points available online  Platform:  Redhat ES3, dual 3GHz P4, 16 GB memory, 1 TB RAID array

6. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Retrieval Performance

7. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Limitations  Data acquisition engine has failed a few times  Scaling issues  Data retrieval server fails often, requiring constant monitoring  Possibly vulnerable to ill-behaved clients  Initial version is incompletely documented  Backup system only partially implemented and not automated

8. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Limitations  Awkward management of data streams and groups  results in archiving unneeded streams  Scaling problem with original design  many data “chunks” contain only one point in time, resulting in very large database tables  causes slow data retrieval times  one system failure was a table index overflow!

9. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Development Activities  Goal is to achieve a stable system requiring minimal monitoring  New version is test case project using more rigorous Software Engineering practices  Formal requirements, design review, development standards, code review, testing…

10. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration New Features  Automated backups to Computer Center tape silos (we’re a drop in the bucket to them)  Stream/group management policies and tools to assist in management  Data culling capabilities similar to Epics ADEL but will work on fields other than.VAL  Fixing and documenting the data retrieval access mechanism

11. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Future Plans  Decommissioning system clogged with redundant and damaged data  Starting over with a clean database using data culling wherever appropriate  Managing stream requests so data is only archived for the period of user interest  High performance lossless data compression

12. Controls Group April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Summary  Current czar archiver is meeting customer needs, but has problems  Development activities are underway to shore up holes in the current system  Planning to start with a fresh system that is more thoroughly engineered and tested up front

13. April 28, 2005 EPICS Collaboration Controls Group Status of the Channel Access Zippy Archiver (CZAR) B. Bevins, et. al.