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Reliability, Footprint & Portability

Hi

I tried to search but could not find if the following questions were asked in this forum. If they were i would apologize to ask them again.

1) How reliable is ICE for developing Control system of an application where there is one management node and one managee node (on different Hardware/OS). Also does it support guaranteed delivery mode in case one end of the application is down for brief period?

2) Is ICE supported on PowerPC running a Linux?

3) How does it performs on 500 MHZ CPU (PowerPC) and 128 MB RAM? In short what is memory footprint of the smallest distribution?

Thanks,
Prakash

Comments

  • 1) How reliable is ICE for developing Control system of an application where there is one management node and one managee node (on different Hardware/OS). Also does it support guaranteed delivery mode in case one end of the application is down for brief period?
    Ice performs twoway method invocation by default. This means that a client waits for a reply when it calls a method on a remote object. Communication errors or problems that Ice can detect will result in an exception. Properly written Ice applications can therefore be very reliable.

    What kind of semantics do you need for a guaranteed delivery mode? Ice supports timeouts and retry which may cover all of the cases that concern you. See the Ice documentation for details.
    2) Is ICE supported on PowerPC running a Linux?
    While Linux + PowerPC is not on our supported platform list, I have used Ice with Gentoo Linux on a Blue & White Mac G3 350.
    3) How does it performs on 500 MHZ CPU (PowerPC) and 128 MB RAM? In short what is memory footprint of the smallest distribution?
    It depends if you are referring to a development platform or just runtime. 128 MB is a little small for a development platform although I have built Ice with 256 MB RAM on an 200 MHz MIPS based machine with adequate swap space. If you are just running Ice applications, 128 MB is more than enough room for Ice but how much memory you need will really depend on your application. A 500 MHz PowerPC is more than adequate for building and running Ice.

    You should look at Ice-E if memory consumption is a major concern. I've run Ice-E applications on a diskless 200 MHz MIPS device with 16 MB of RAM. That significance of 'diskless' is that the 16 MB of RAM holds the filesystem and the memory for the applications.

    While we don't have benchmarks for Linux+PowerPC, Ice performs very nicely on both my MIPS and PowerPC machines.

    Please note that while I do use Ice and Ice-E on PowerPC Linux and MIPS machines, we do not thoroughly test our products on these platforms and they are not currently officially supported. These devices are part of my personal computer collection and I use Ice on them for fun. In both cases, the build system required very minor tweaks to compile and I have yet to find a platform specific bug. Basically, if I have a a piece of electronics that has a C++ compiler or a JVM, I'll try and run Ice on it :) Please contact us if you have commercial interest in an having a specific platform officially supported.

    Btw, I just noticed you don't mention the project you are working on in your signature. Please see our support policy with respect to signatures.