What is StateMachineRateControl.fBock supposed to be?

[dneise]

As discussed in yesterdays telcon, I should get the ratecontrol ready for testing the orbit mode. At the moment I try to fully understand the existing ratecontrol before making modifications.

I cannot understand the purpose of the variable named fBlock (vector<bool>).

It is initialized to be 40 elements long (which would imply it has something to do with the number of boards) and later it is resized

fBlock.assign(160, false);

(which would imply it has something to do with the number of patches)

however when it finally is used, only the first 40 of its 160 elements are looked at.

for (int i=0; i<40; i++)
{

if (fBlock[i])
{

fBlock[i] = false;
continue;

}
...

}

So now I'm puzzled what it is used for and the actual purpose is not clear to me.

[tbretz]

This is to block the use of a biased value just after the update.

[dneise]

Ah, this is new to me.
So according to your short answer and further studies of the code, the following happens:

When a threshold of a patch is modified, the next rate measurement of the entire FTU board (we have 4 patches per FTU) will be "biased". So ratecontrol does not look at the next rate measurement from that particular board.

Since this is new to me I have a couple of questions:

First, in order to save your time. Is there anything written down about this is an internal paper, email or talk I can read before asking a lot of possibly stupid questions?

Second:

Do you know in which way the next rate measurement is affected? will it be too high? too low? totally random? Do you know what order of magnitude the effect is? Do you know why all patches on an FTU are affected, if the threshold in one patch is modified?

What is the best way to get rid of these "biased" rate measurements in offline analyzes, i.e. when looking at aux-files?

[tbretz]

1) Yes, we discussed that in more than one telcon a couple of years ago. I am sure you can find that in the minutes.

2) No, I don't remember.

3? Only take the rates not issued just after a threshold change