I have been using SGP with GNS to wake me in the event of a serious problem. SGP is supposed to set a countdown timer in GNS for all activities so that if GNS does not hear from SGP by the end of the timer, it assumes that SGP has crashed and should wake me up. However, it appears that for a certain duration during each image cycle, GNS shows that its countdown time has been “Paused”. I believe this is happening during the image download and analysis phase, but I’m not entirely sure. In any case, a few nights ago SGP crashed while the GNS timer was paused. As a result, I was never notified that anything was wrong.
Can anything be done to eliminate that “paused” time? It seems like there should be countdown timer for every activity in SGP and the countdown timer should really never be paused unless there is some serious error that won’t allow continuing the sequence, in which case SGPl should report that error to GNS.
Jaime from Lunatico (GNS author) here; that’s true, once the session starts, the GNS timer should never be paused; generous timeouts are however valid.
Exactly so. The pause is intended to follow an actual user pause (manual pause, I mean). Other than that, up to when the session is ended, roof safely closed, the timer should run non-stop. And then fully stopped (not just paused).
If you have any internal watchdog task or similar it could be easily used to feed the timer, while specific actions can just update the messages.
GNS behavior has been modified slightly in the next 3.1 beta release:
On sequence frame integration start set time for exposure length plus 3 min.
On successful download of frame, reset timer to 30 min
Repeat
After the 3.1 release we can try to adapt the GNS timer to be more activity specific… like a specific timer for meridian flip, another for centering, etc… This should work fine for now.
