Optimizing FAIM

Optimize the performance of FAIM in terms of disk, memory usage, and speed through the engine configuration file. The relevant engine parameters are listed below.

Maximum (hours) of available history

This parameter should be set to the smallest value possible for the simulation requirements. Setting this parameter to a high value increases the storage requirements for ICs and the time taken to save and restore a snapshot.

Maximum number of stored alarms

Never set this parameter to a value higher than the number of viewable alarms on the Alarm History Display (AHD) in FoxAlert. By default, AHD displays up to 5000 alarms in Foxboro Evo V8.2 and later systems.

If FAIM stores a large number of alarms, more memory and disk space is utilized, and longer time is taken for backtrack / IC save and restore operations.

Even if AHD is configured to display a large number of alarms, configure FAIM to store and provide fewer alarms to improve the performance.

Default RTP data file size (in MB)

By default, FAIM creates each RTP database file with a size of 10MB which is a sufficient file size for most of the circumstances. However, increase it for large historians and decrease it for small historians.

If the specified size of the RTF file is not sufficient to store one-hour long RTP data, FAIM automatically increases it. When the file size increases beyond the configured size, messages are logged to the Historian log file indicating that an increase in size was required. If these messages frequently appear in the historian log, increase the parameter value. While FAIM can dynamically resize the file, this process is time consuming and causes the simulator to ‘pause’. Therefore, it is not recommended to let FAIM perform this operation.