The flow of information through the instrument hardware and software is sufficiently complex that a purely text-based representation is beyond human comprehension. A pictorial database entry tool called etcha alleviates this difficulty. Etcha makes it easy to create inventorial lists of agents, and at the same time it permits documentation their dependency on each other. The final output material from the database of meme flows aids debugging because it is possible to perform queries about the entire life history of a particular meme from creation to archiving.

This particular drawing shows the sequence of processes involved in the startup of one instrument subsystem. Various flows of information represent bundles of command line flags and Unix environment which affect the operation of some components. Other flows represent dynamic library linking.