Scans appearing on distiller out of sequence

[AlexanderJPattison]

Scans occasionally appear on distiller out of sequence (e.g. ID no 22062, 22063, acquired 15/11/2024). This usually happens when we are taking data rapidly, such as with the multiscan acquisition. This issue is mostly cosmetic and I believe that the correct data populates the correct scans, but this issue affects the system for determining whether a scan has finished acquiring as the most recently acquired scan won't appear as the first entry in the list when this happens.

[cjh1]

Interesting, so we sort the scans by their creation time. The creation time is obtained by running stat on the status file generated by the receiver code. So my guess is that during the time between the scan being detected and stat being run on the file, the file gets updated again ( the receiver code keep write the file ), although I am not sure if that would things to get out of order with the next scan. Is the time field in the progress file the time the scan was taken, if so maybe we should be using that?