We had issues with the frontend write cache size and the way it was implemented in the frontend
framework mfe. Specifically, we had two equipments like in the experiment/examples/frontend.cxx, one
trigger event and one periodic event. While the trigger event sets the cache size correctly in the
equipment table, the periodic event (defined afterwards) overwrites the cache size to zero, causing slow
data taking.
The underlying problem is that one event buffer (usually "SYSTEM") can only have one cache size for all
events in one frontend. To avoid mishaps like that, I remove the write cache size from the equipment table
and instead defined a function which explicitly sets the cache size for a buffer. In your frontend_init() you
can now call
set_cache_size("SYSTEM", 10000000);
to set the cache size of the SYSTEM buffer. Note that 10 MiB is the minimum cache size. Especially for
smaller events, this dramatically can speed up your maximal DAQ rate.
Full commit is here:
https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/commits/24fbf2c02037ae5f7db74d0cadab23cd4bfe3b13
Note that this only affects frontends using the mfe framework, NOT for those using the tmfe framework.
Stefan |