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Re: [idvusers] running IDV in background using Xvfb or Xvnc

Thanks, Brendon (and other responders). I'm glad to hear that you find this is robust. Thanks for the detailed example. 

Don

On 1/13/16 9:02 AM, Brendon Hoch wrote:

Hi Don,

IDV 5.2 seems to be robust enough under Linux to allow for cronjobs &
ISL to produce products with Xvfb on a reliable basis.  We're running on
CentOS 7.2.1511; the server also has other jobs plus a full LDM suite.
We have about 8 IDV cronjobs running at various intervals, ranging from
every 10 minutes for a local radar product to hourly for satellite
imagery on a 24/7 basis.  Each job runs IDV with a ISL script.  I've
enclosed one example bundle, ISL script and run script of a NE current
temperature map.

The one thing we've noticed is that once in a while (once a week to once
every few weeks), an IDV job gets hung up and we see a high number of
kernel context switches.  To mitigate this, we use the timeout utility
embedded in our runIDV script to kill any IDV job that lasts more than
10 minutes:

/bin/timeout 10m  ${java}   -Xmx${idv_memory}m  -XX:+DisableExplicitGC
-Didv.enableStereo=false -jar ${dirname}/idv.jar $*

We're not sure which script produces the hangup or why, but it's
infrequent enough that I'm willing to live with it.  It might be a
situation where IDV is looking for data on a server and can't find it or
there's a network connectivity issue.  It would be great if there was a
way for IDV to exit cleanly in these unattended ISL situations.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the reliability, so much so that I now
see this as a viable alternative to replacing many of our legacy WXP &
Gempak scripts.

Hope this helps,
Brendon


--
Don Murray
NOAA/ESRL/PSD and CU-CIRES
303-497-3596
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/don.murray/