I read a post where someone mentioned that it is best practice not to use the default tag provider since it causes issues with the Gateway network later on. This person had seen this at ICC.
How many tag providers are users creating?
Are you creating one tag provider per piece of equipment, per PLC, something else?
How granular do you go?
I have one manufacturing project with several functional areas. For a few reasons we created a project for each area with graphics, templates and gateway scripts. We then created a separate tag provider for each area.
This gave us the ability to capture all of the functional components of an area with an export of the project and the tag provider. Each functional area exists in multiple facilities, and with different versions of equipment. This gave us a way to build a solution for a given facility by combining projects and tag providers.
It doesn't cause direct problems with the gateway network, but if you want to run the same project on more than one gateway while pointing to the same source tags, you'll want unique tag provider names. This way you can take a project using uniqueTagProviderName1 from gateway1 and run it on gateway2 with a remote tag provider named uniqueTagProviderName1 that links to the tag provider on gateway1.
Let say there will be a total of 250k tags, there are 4 functional areas, but other than being able to use the same provider for miltiple gatways easily what are the other benefits of using multiple tag providers?
I am wondering if there are any performance benefits of multiple tag providers.