W.,

on my computer, I can do approx. 3000 tags changing 1/second, with just 0-2% CPU load, over the public Internet, to a demo OPC-UA server of Ascolab. My computer is fairly powerful (Intel Core i7-3930K @3.20G 3.80G), but given the low CPU load, the computer specs should not be a problem.

Anybody can verify this using these steps:

1. Install QuickOPC (OPC Data Client), version 5.30. Do a custom install, make sure you check the "Test Tools -> Test Tools (.NET)" feature.
2. From the Start menu, locate and run the "Test Tools -> EasyOPC-UA Forms Test Application".
3. In the test app, select "LiveData" under "Available commands", press Perform.
4. In the "OPC-UA Live Data" form, press the "Bulk Add..." button
5. In the "Browse for OPC-UA" dialog, when the root "Hosts" node is selected, press the green "plus sign" button, and enter new host name "demo.ascolab.com" (without quotes), press Enter.
6. Select/expand the "opc.tcp://demo.ascolab.com:4841" server
7. Click on the "MassTest" node
8. Press the "add subtree" button - it is the middle button in the row of three buttons around the center of the dialog.
9. Observe the nodes being added; the count is in the status bar. When the count is roughly at the desired value (3000), press the OK button. Note that the browsing may be relatively slow, but that's not to be confused with the subscription speed.
10. In the "OPC-UA Live Data" form, observe the changing values.

I suppose you can achieve the same with appropriate configuration of the TOP Server/KepServerEx.

From: W.
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 10:51 PM
To: Zbynek Zahradnik
Subject: UA Performance Questions.

Zbynek,

I have a question regarding UA performance. This is from a customer of ours. If you have any supporting data or if his configuration has been done before please let me know.

Thanks,

W.


“We currently are running EasyOPC DA 3.02, running around 3000 tags most of which are polled every second, and around 50 or so polled every 500ms. We are considering moving to EasyOPC 5.X UA. Reading up on UA, I realize that UA has the potential to run substantially slower than it's DA counter part. Is it realistic to achieve the above scenario with EasyOPC UA? (I'm fine with utilizing the binary protocol...) The OPC Server is KepwareEX 5.1.7 if your care. Do you have any performance metrics on your product? Any anecdotes?
Recommended hardware specs for above scenario? We need to know if we're barking up the right tree before we invest too much development time into it.”