Use of tag() binding in expressions is bad?

Ignition
21

I think they are pretty straightforward if you come up with a good naming scheme to remember them by:

:root {
  /* The "Magic Colours" Palette */
  --status-standby: #DECAFE;
  --status-active: #C0FFEE;
  --status-ok: #BADA55;
  --status-warning: #FEEB1E;
  --status-error: #B00B00;
  --status-shutdown: #DEFEA7;
  --icon-home: #AB0DE5;
  --icon-help: #A55157;
  --icon-audit: #A55E55;
  --icon-remove: #DEFEC8;
  --ui-placeholder: #FACADE;
}

See what I mean? :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

2 Likes
22

The forum is super handy but knowledge is dispersed. I wonder if perhaps IA could/should host a community wiki where best practices and such from community experts and IA team could be combined, consolidated and refined/expounded upon over time in a way that the forum doesn't generally accommodate.
I often come across some older IA articles like this one (https://support.inductiveautomation.com/hc/en-us/articles/13578100743053-Cloning-a-VM) that are useful but outdated and somewhat wrong/misleading for the current version of Ignition. In wiki form something like that could be corrected/updated by the community.
Has that idea been discussed much before?

2 Likes
23

I think it would be helpful if the Manual would also point some of these best practices out. There are lots of things it tells you CAN do, but it doesn't say in which cases you definitely SHOULDN'T do it.

tag()
binding UDT vs path to UDT
etc..

1 Like
24

Fantastic!

25

I think you’ll be surprised at how much of an improvement you see.

There are other things that can cause really bad performance issues. Here’s some things you should check out.

Some of the Ignition drivers allow you to drag/drop tags into the tag DB (which is awesome). Some people will drag/drop all the tags into the tag db which is a terrible idea because all of the tags will be subscribed and it will greatly impact performance. You can see how many tags are on the system from the status page in 8.1.x and below. In 8.3 you can see the tags per provider in “Services/Tags”. I had a customer once sub 600k+ tags on a system that really only needed about 10-15k. It ran terribly. It can be a real adventure figuring out what tags you can get rid of.

You should probably check out the diagnostics pages in the gateway webpage. Look for scripting threads with long run times. Sometimes people who are new to Ignition will use sleep timers in the shared thread or do really beefy scripts in bad places. Also check memory and CPU usage. The diagnostics tools on the gateway page are really powerful. They should help you identify sources for slowdown.

1 Like
26

Thanks, I am sure we have all of the above. For the tags we did do a halfway decent job of UDTs so editing those will remove lots of tags at once.
Yes, this was programming by newbies 6 years ago. The integrator had no idea what they were doing, they had never used Perspective before, and neither had we.
The scripts were not written by me, and I don’t know how to script.

yeah, I’m going to be busy for a while, but such is life….

1 Like