Internal Historian and Point Limit Size

Ignition
1

Hello everyone,

As part of a project, we need to store thousands of values either every second or every minute.

We're currently using the Internal Historian to collect the data. However, we've noticed that values older than about a day are being overwritten with zero.

We adjusted the "Point Limit Size" setting, which controls how many data points are stored per tag in the Internal Historian. This allowed us to retain more data, but it also drastically increased the size of the project backup.

Here are my questions:

  • What is the impact of the "Point Limit Size" and what are its limitations?
  • Is it normal for the Point Limit Size to affect the backup file size?
  • Should we consider switching to another solution instead of the Internal Historian if we need to store hundreds (or even thousands) of values per second?

Thanks a lot for your help!

2

The internal historian is basically a very small historian that is functionally a file in the backup, that is only good for storing very small amounts of data. I'm kind of amazed you've not lost a load of data using something like this for such a heavy database use

You really need to consider setting up a proper SQL database, a good free option would be something mariaDB or postgres.

Refer to this guide for advice on sizing your historian for this use case:
Ignition Server Sizing and Architecture Guide | Inductive Automation

1 Like
3

You shouldn't use the Internal Historian to store a lot of data. You should have a Database. Internal Historian is intendeed for small and not long-term storage.