I’m having issues browsing my OPC DA connection. I have a OPC Classic connection to my ABB OPC Server where we have about 35 controllers connected. In 8.1, i could use the “OPC Quick Client” to browse these controllers but as of 8.3 this is removed from the gateway.
I have tried using the “OPC Browser” in the designer but I get a 30 second “timeout” error before reaching the tags. The OPC Server is known to be slow, and even in the OPC Quick Client on 8.1 it takes longer than 30 seconds to browse into the application of the controller.
Has anyone had similar problems? This is the timeout error im getting, can I increase the time before timeout for this error?:
ExecutionException: java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException: Idle timeout expired: 30000/30000 ms
caused by TimeoutException: Idle timeout expired: 30000/30000 ms
The OPC connection is green and we have made som tags that are correctly polling/updating, so I can confirm the OPC connection is working.
Thankful for any tips
I don't know about the connection timeout, but on v8.3.3, the quick client returns. You may also check into if your ABB OPC server is capable of using OPC-UA as I don't know how much longer IA is going to support the old OPC-DA connections since it's an older protocol that's notorious for being troublesome.
As a workaround, you can start your Designer with this system flag:
-Dignition.designer.websocketIdleTimeout=60000
I think there is a hard-coded timeout somewhere else that would prevent anything longer from having any effect when browsing OPC tags from the Designer.
(this is an 8.3 setting, ignore the Designer Name and the fact this entry is for an 8.1 gateway)
That’s great to hear, the quick client was really handy to troubleshoot the odd devices we have.
Unfortunately, these devices do not support OPC UA, and we have a large quantity of them. We are replacing old hardware with OPC UA supported controllers but these OPC DA dependant devices will probably be in use for another 10-15 years.
I would recommend planting a seed with decision makers that their equipment is reaching end of life.
I have been systematically upgrading systems from RSView32 for the past decade+ because I planted that seed to protect my customers from future problems that were coming in those days and are clearly here now. It takes a long time to upgrade all the systems but now it’s pretty hard to get a 32 bit windows OS and it isn’t a problem for the ones that listened.
If you wait too long you eventually end up adding technical debt to support the technical debt you already have. If the technical debt is old PLCs you end up adding layers of signal converters or things like that. If it’s a computer that only runs on 32 bit windows OS you have to add VMs with P2V, etc. It’s not pretty and it increases support costs long term.
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I have been testing this today. It seems to have helped a bit, some controllers can now be browsed all the way while others still time out but with a new timeout error. We will continue to investigate if there’s anything we can do on the OPC server side of the matter, but in our previous SCADA system (which we are working to migrate from but is still operational), the browse is much quicker.
If all else fails we can create tags from our XML files since the polling seems to be working fine, but this would be a nice to have working.
Is Ignition on the same server as the OPC DA server or on a separate server? Is the old SCADA on the OPC DA server or a separate server? If the old SCADA is on the same server and Ignition on a separate server, you may try installing Ignition on the OPC DA server (if it's not too old of an OS) as a test to see if it performs better there. If so, you may just want to get a license for it to just run comms on that server and use a remote tag provider on your main system to talk to it (or use OPC UA at that point).
I don't really know why browsing would be slower or faster, OPC Classic browsing is somewhat opaque compared to OPC UA.
Maybe DA2 vs DA3, or some kind of filter on the items? No idea, really...
