Open IP Sockets
TurnipTruck
Posts: 1,485
Greetings,
In your experiences, how many IP sockets can be opened and held open simultaniously with no data transfer per controller? Would it matter with the vintage of the controller? Thanks.
In your experiences, how many IP sockets can be opened and held open simultaniously with no data transfer per controller? Would it matter with the vintage of the controller? Thanks.
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http://www.amxforums.com/showthread.php?7268-#5
The 200 number is what I recall from training but I don't recall if that's the max number, max simultaneous, max definable?
The other day some one posted they thought the max simultaneous ip connection were 20 but I think he intended to write 200.
Can you watch the connections in WireShark and see who initiates the closing. I don't have much faith in Sharp products so maybe they timeout when idle. Have you tried to add connections incrementally to see when the problem begins?
http://amx.com/techsupport/techNote.asp?id=288
With no traffic, the TVs will disconnect after three minutes, as described in the manual.
Just working with one TV, they work exactly as advertised in the manual.
It seems to me that the master can only attempt to open a small quantity of connections simultaniously.
I wanted to suggest opening one at a time initiating the next when the current ip_client_open triggers the online handler. IP connections can tend to bog down the processor while they negotiate their connection.
So here is the deal:
Open IP connection.... Send message...... Close connection
Everything works fine.
However, if the open connection is broken by a network issue or a reboot of the AMX, etc, the sets will no longer respond until the IP Control function is reinitialized in the set's menu system.
To Sharp's credit, they did excalate my tech support call to engineering. I have not heard back yet though.
What's interesting is that a normally functioning TV will automatically close the IP connection after 3 minutes and I see the offline event from Netlinx. However, a locked up set will show an online event when the connection is made, but no three minute automatic offline event ever comes. I can close the connection though Netlinx and the offline event is triggered. Hmmm.
What happens if you pull the network plug from the TV?
If this brings a TV's connection back alive after an AMX power cycle or network error (as you describe) then you could put the TVs network connection on a power controller and reset it from the control system.
Kludgy, but it might work...
I must say that Sharp was VERY helpful. I was impressed with their responsiveness.
Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk
Sharp sent a new firmware to try and the problem was resolved. They have since put that firmware on their auto-update server making it very easy for me to update all of the sets in this particular installation over their Internet connections. Sharp acknowledged the problem as being on ALL of their IP-controllable sets. New firmware has been released applying the fix to across the whole line.
Especially given the pessimism expressed by many about about Sharp, I was very impressed by how they handled it. Within a few hours of calling their main number, I got a call back from someone who knew exactly what I was trying to describe and took the steps to get the problem fixed. Several weeks later the new firmware was made available.
Way to go Sharp!
From M2M - Design Considerations, Constraints, and Topologies
For instance if I had to quote on a job with hundreds of IP devices then I need to do a stress test to figure out how many simultaneous devices I can connect to each master and how much data can be parsed before it all goes brown.
What I was thinking was creating a server program on one master that can take up to 200 simultaneous IP connections and echo whatever is sent by the clients, then make a client program on another master where I can dynamically increase IP connections, string size and repeat rate.
Next I play around until I figure out the point where I blame AMX for providing a faulty processor because it couldn't possibly be my code causing a it to crash
Has anyone ever tried this, what were the results and were they consistent enough to use when designing systems?
Does anyone have a better way of figuring out how to determine the maximum size of a system per processor?
I recently did a system with lots of IP-controlled TVs. There is very little communication to them. 50 per master worked fine.
I would stagger the opening of the sockets. You won't be able to open them all at once. In the case of my TVs, I built a delay into my comm module that held off the openings based on the virtual device number as brought into the module. Each subsequent instance of the module held off its socket opening for two seconds.
Sent from my MB865 using Tapatalk 2
You can figure it out if you really wanted to break it all down by connections, throughput, events, etc. However, I don't think you want to be running systems so close to their tolerances. Typically the AMX controller is one of the cheapest pieces of equipment in a project. Hell, most TVs cost more. Trying to figure out the maximum size of a system per processor is like trying to figure out the maximum capacity in the elevator you are in. Theoretically interesting, but you don't want to be anywhere near it in practice.
Paul
The latest models have all the IR remote commands available as serial and IP. Maybe too late to make a believer out of you, but I thought you should know.