Software Release Note for fdserver version 3.1

Implemented SCRs:

SCR 0001166

The contents of the sky map cache is stored in the file system and read back after a restart, thus no longer requiring -long- recomputation of these maps. The cache is stored automatically every hour and when the server is stopped. The file is written to the systems temporary directory (/var/tmp on Solaris). It's a zip containing pseudo XML representation of the sky maps. To allow multiple instances on the same computer storing separate files, the file name contains the RMI port number to keep them separate indeed. A starting server will detect existing stored caches and select the most recent file to read and populate the cache with. Handling large files (10M for 1000 sky maps) is slow on Solaris. A starting server may need 2 minutes or so to read the cache and twice that amount of time to write it (be aware of this when stopping and re-starting!).

Other changes/comments:

• The internals of the FD code have been refactored, improving the s/w engineering and the performance. Two new properties (fd.properties) have been introduced to control performance parameters. fd.poolSize takes an integer value and determines the number of IFDSOC binaries that will be used concurrently. A good value is the number of CPUs in the machine and then some for good luck. fd.dbob.concurrencyLevel takes 3 possible values: 0 - meaning no concurrency, one binary at a time, 1 - meaning striped initialization of the DBOB using a Thread per stripe (default 8), 2 - interval level concurrency (the default).