Performance Evaluation of EPICS on PowerPC

A portion of software components of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS)[1] has been ported to a VME single board computer based on a PowerPC microprocessor. We have studied 1) the performance of a database scanning, 2) the Channel Access performance and 3) interrupt latency on the PowerPC based CPU board. The CPU load of the VME single board computer arising from the database scanning was measured using the standard benchmark database developed by APS/ANL. The transaction process time required for putting and getting a value through Channel Access was studied as a performance indicator of Channel Access. Interrupt latency was measured to study overall responsiveness to an external event in EPICS on the PowerPC based board. The results of measurements were compared with the results on a 68040 based CPU board.