Just wanted to put this out in the hopes that it helps someone else.
I’m finishing up a project that uses two of these mini PCs running clients on large screen displays for system status. I decided to install Ubuntu 10.10, since I had quite positive experiences testing Ignition on Ubuntu in the past and the price is definitely right!
From the beginning, I noticed performance was lagging. One display had four Easy Charts and a few numeric readouts, nothing fancy. Some of the Easy Charts would only update every five minutes or so, and the numeric readouts would occasionally freeze for 30 seconds or so at a time. After adjusting timing and such, I decided that the Atom processor was just too underpowered, and chalked it up as a learning experience.
Last night, after upgrading the server to Ignition 7.2.2, the two display clients broke. Nothing would update, everything on the client just ground to a halt. After 30 minutes or so fiddling around, I hit Google. Immediately, I found various complaints about OpenJDK being the default Java implementation in Ubuntu, and OpenJDK causing various and sundry performance issues.
I wiped out OpenJDK and downloaded and installed Sun Java. After resetting my client auto start scripts, both status clients now operate as fast as the client running on the operator workstation (Dell OptiPlex with quad-core processor.) So, no more OpenJDK for me, until they get all of the performance issues worked out. Lesson learned.
