The UI in the Manufacturing Starter Apps can be used to set up an Industrial Gateway in order to create a connection between Kepware and the ThingWorx server. When it is set up through the Manufacturing Apps, it also creates a "master" Remote Thing that mimics the Industrial Gateway and contains all of the tags coming from Kepware as properties. When Assets are created in the Manufacturing Apps UI, any property bindings made in the Configuration and Setup application will use the "master" Remote Thing to create the bindings as local bindings instead of directly from Industrial Gateway as remote bindings. If there are a significant number of properties coming from Kepware, this "master" Remote Thing can cause a bottleneck and cause the system to drastically decrease its performance and potentially crash.
Crashes were experienced approximately every 20 minutes with 20 devices sending 18 properties each through a single Kepware connection to ThingWorx. This calculates to 360 properties on the "master" Remote Thing with 15 of the properties sending updates every 30ms and the remaining on value change.
For a production system, we have changed the architecture to used a distributed system with multiple remote things in order to distribute the load so the system doesn’t not crash. An architecture like this is more suited for a large scale production system. If the Manufacturing Apps can adapt this change, adoption of manufacturing apps in production systems would be more practical.
