Orateur
Description
Timing systems at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Swiss Light Source, SwissFEL) are highly sensitive
to external load: even standard monitoring or large numbers of clients can interfere with
deterministic behavior.
This contribution presents two simple but effective approaches used in production.
First, a non-intrusive EPICS-based asynchronous logging system is used to observe the 3 Hz
storage ring injection sequence without disturbing the timing master. It provides continuous
diagnostics while keeping the system fully unaffected.
Second, an EPICS Channel Access gateway is used to isolate the timing master from client load,
reducing ~500 clients to a single connection. The key point is that the gateway remains in the same
subnet (machine network), with isolation achieved via port-based access. This is a very simple
setup, but not widely used.
These two approaches show practical ways to improve observability and scalability of critical
timing systems without compromising their behavior