I've been traveling and working remotely from hotels and noticed that a gateway that I have in both 8.1 and 8.3 that the designer has to download significantly more data in 8.3 compared to 8.1 causing it to take much longer to load.
For instance, I had an 8.1 gateway that I backed up and restored to a new 8.3 gateway. When loading the 8.1 designer on the main project, it only downloads like 13MB of data according to the splash/loading screen. The identical project when I open it on the 8.3 gateway downloads over 80MB of data. The gateway backups of either 8.1 or 8.3 is about the same size (only about 100k difference).
When working locally, I never noticed a difference due to network speeds, but working from some bandwidth limited locations "exposed" the significant amount of data being transferred in 8.3 vs 8.1. Is this expected, or has anyone else experienced this?
What modules do you have installed?
I think in 8.1 you'd only have to download JXBrowser if you had Perspective or the Web Browser, and in 8.3 it's just part of the Designer core.
Maybe.
Mostly default with some drivers left out (Omron, Mitsubishi, etc), and I left off the SFC, and SMS/Voice notifications. I did add the WebDev module, but I had almost all modules loaded in 8.1 plus a bunch of 3rd party modules I was testing. (I don't really need all the 3rd party modules, so left a lot of them off the 8.3 system to keep it cleaner).
Edit: Also to note, the gateway backups are roughly 22.5MB, and while I know that's zipped up, it just seems like not all of that would even be loaded when loading a project in designer.
Does it download 80mb every time or just the first time and then it's cached?
Every time unfortunately.
Edit: Added some screen recordings of 8.1 vs 8.3 loading the same project on each.
v8.1
v8.3
Is it definitely the project? If you create a new/empty project does it still download a bunch?
edit: I think it is the project... which you said all along and I just didn't want to believe because of the size. Can you send me a project export or gateway backup?
Before (Ignition 8.3.3):
After (Ignition dev):
What was missing is gzip compression on the new RPC routes, which are being used to download the project/resources.
The splash screen is a bit wonky - the same 2000kb/s bandwidth limit (with some jitter) is in place for both. It's now basically measuring the decompression rate and total bytes received, because at the point this is being measured the stream of bytes has already been decompressed.
Your "Universe" project is 68M uncompressed in both Ignition 8.1 and 8.3 - nothing changed there.
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I suspected something like this was maybe going on....or was wonder actually if you did compression during transfer of the data from server to clients. So 8.1.x used gzip, but 8.3.x up to now wasn't? But the gzip compression in the dev version is (nightly?) enabled again? If so, is this going to come back in 8.3.4?
And it also sounds like the measurement in 8.1.x was the compressed data and in 8.3.x it is the uncompressed data? Would it be better to show both? I don't know what end users would rather see....total uncompressed size or total data transfer over the wire.
It's not in the nightly, it's in my local copy where I just fixed it.
I'm gonna throw this over to another team now and they can figure out how to deal with the inaccurate instrumentation of the input stream.
I think it should show and measure what actually went over the wire, not what the size was when decompressed. That's a silly thing to measure.
@paul-griffith
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I agree....would personally prefer over the wire myself which would also remove any confusion like I had on the bump in transfer size. Plus the rate would throw off anyone over a metered connection wondering how they're getting faster speeds than what they even have available.
Thank you for the quick diagnosis!
