1768-L45 Online connection lag

[Gadelric]

Wizards,

I have this older machine, running v20.19.
We have a huge lag when trying to go online with this bad boy.
This is one of my oldest running piece of equipment and its still making money for the company, so there is no signs of it being shuffled to the back 40 any time soon.

I've tried to connect through both of the network cards and the lag is similar.
I've disconnected the PLC from the network and went directly to the ports, lag remains, some times there is upwards of 1 min before the program tree will respond when expanding it, sometimes studio just freezes up and wont respond at all.
There is another 1768-L45 in the plant that I can connect to, has minor lag, but nothing like this one. This tells me my computer is OK.
Line runs great, but when it doesn't, trying to connect while the plant manager is perched on my shoulder is painful

IO memory is 20%, program memory is 40% ( use to run at 94% memory until I cleaned out old programs).

Has this old guy finally started to reach its end of life?
Rumor has it the processor was replaced 5-6 years ago, but the contractor supplied the processor and gave them a good deal when they installed it.

If I was to investigate upgrading the PLC, is there a cross reference that I could follow that would check to see how far I could upgrade considering I have these IO cards and these VFD drives?
In a perfect world, I would love to find a plug and play processor as an upgrade but I don't live anywhere near a perfect world and expect some compatibility issues that need to be accounted for.


Gad

 

[5618]

We have a few L43 with two ENBT modules: one module local IO, one module plant network. One particular system was always painfully slow to work online from the plant network. Online with a laptop on the IO network was fine. MSGs from a ControlLogix on the plant network worked fine. I couldn’t find anything to actually show the plant ENBT was bad but replacing it solved the problem.

As far as replacement, if you’re only using one ENBT, there’s other Compact processors that will use the 1769 IO and should be a relatively easy swap. If you’re using two ENBT then dang, there’s no other Compact series with dual networks that’ll mate to existing 1769 modules. At that point you might be looking using a NATR for the second network, making the existing rack remote using a 1769-AENTR, or replacing the whole rack. If you’re using a 1768 ControlNet or DeviceNet module, you’ll have to figure a solution for that.

 

[Gadelric]

Thank you for the information.

The only reason they put in a second network card was they ran out of IP addresses as they had 2 lines sharing the IP addresses. Only the secondary tooling for this line uses the second network card.

There were lots of issues with the way they had it and I put in Nat devices to separate the lines. This freed up a ton of IP addresses as well as ended the IP conflict that would pop up randomly.

I will prob leave it as is and deal with the lag until this program cycle ends and I can dump the secondary network they put in. This would allow me to drop one of the network cards during the processor update, as well as getting all of the equipment on the same network. Everything is ethernet IO, simple network, lots of traffic.

Gad