Compact Logix To RSView 32 Communications

[wes_h_13]

Hello

I have a compact logix L5573 that is going to be talking to three computers running RSView32. The most tags I will have is 5000. I have been reading lots of topics about communication optimization between Control Logix PLC's and RSlinx classic. It is a bit of a pain and a lot of extra work to organize everything to array files. Do you think this is necessary with this type of processor.

If I do need to optimize. If I create an array of UDT's does this help communications or do the arrays have to be of the native tag type (I.E FLOAT,DINT,INT). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Ken Roach]

Using arrays is always helpful when optimizing communications between a SCADA/HMI computer and a controller. If you want the very best communications performance, use arrays of Atomic (DINT, REAL, BOOL) tags.

Arrays of UDTs are less efficient, but still far more efficient than addressing individual tags.

A sort-of-related example; a recent thread involving a DCS interface that was given random access to a PLC-5E data table was able to be reduced from 13 seconds poll rate to 1 second poll rate by optimizing the reads and writes to a handful of Data Tables instead of individual elements of timers, counters, integers, floats, and PID control blocks.

If you really want the best performance, set up one of those computers to be an RSLinx Classic Remote OPC Server, and let the RSView32 computers get their data from a single instance of RSLinx Classic.