LAE

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Originally posted by: campbell

Are there any enhancements in the 4.5 controller ?

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Originally posted by: Tim Meagher

Hey,

Are you referring to the external controller, or the BRE controller?

If referring to the external controller, are you referring to running nodes within BRE using the external controller, or using the laeController script (formerly brainController).

I think the last significant changes to the BRE controller were in 4.1.7.

As far as I am aware no enhancements have been made to either controller in 4.5.0 or 4.5.1. - I'm pretty sure if there were any they would have been called out in the release notes. I haven't looked through all of the release notes yet, so you should probably check that out.

In 4.5.2 there have been no changes to the BRE controller.

However, there were some improvements made relating to the communication process between BRE & the external controller in 4.5.2. This mostly affects slow machines and large graphs.

The relevant release notes are:

For Issue 3436:

"Running a very large graph using the external control in BRE on an LAE server on a slow machine would silently fail and do nothing. This has been fixed."

and for issue 3454:

"Using the External Controller with streaming on a Solaris server runs more reliably now. Sometimes when running a graph with a few hundred or more JavaNodes and using the External Controller with streaming some JavaNodes would report the error "WARN: Channel does not support mark" and some JavaNodes would not finish executing. These failures have been eliminated."

There is currently some investigation being done into how to improve the performance of the external controller - both for the transmission of the graph specification to the server (i.e. will improve the performance of the external controller when run through BRE) and for the algorithm used to schedule the nodes (will improve performance of the external controller in both cases).

However the list of planned fixes & enhancements for 4.5.3 is yet to be finalized so at this stage it is unclear what of this will make it to the 4.5.3 release.

Hope this helps some.

Tim.

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Originally posted by: dbeauvais

Thanks, Tim. We were particularly interested in the external controller. We're doing testing for the upgrade and were unsure about whether or not to install the new external controller to our production servers, along with BRE 4.5.1, but we have now been convinced that it would be the correct route to take.
David Beauvais
CenturyLink
Monroe, LA.