RSS Feed

We have noticed that again there has been more "Operation timed out" errors for app-to-tag communication, like arm/disarm, apply configuration changes or beep. Upon investigation using network packet analysis, we have blocked several IP addresses that were flooding our server with invalid IP packets. Also we have lowered the "ping frequency" of tag managers to reduce the amount of non-essential traffic. As a result, now the latency from app to tag manager is much shorter than before (always <1s and without timeout error) and the majority of app-to-tag communication latency is now from the tag radio receiver delay, which is programmable from Wireless Settings and in trade-off with tag battery life. 

You can test the intrinsic latency from app to tag manager, by using Debug Console (after you login) where you can use the "Get" button to read tag manager register values chosen at the drop down, e.g. AFSKCTRL, RSSI, etc. note the result only appears after 2nd read.)  The delay from clicking "Get" button to the result appearing, equals to the delay of app commands like "beep" minus the actual tag radio receiver delay

UPDATE (Aug 29) We have switched to a completely new IRC server software that uses "Windows I/O Completion Port" to handle large number of connections. These timeout issues seem to be completely gone now. 

Comment
We have noticed that for some Tag Managers the DNS name look-up for "www.mytaglist.com" can take very long, sometimes over 10 seconds. During the lookup, the tag manager orange up arrow will stay lit and tag manager cannot respond to user commands. We just made a change in the server side (that retroactively becomes effective on all existing long range tag managers with rev>5) to configure your Tag Managers to only do the name look-up once at power on, not each time sending new tag update. This should result in significant reduction in the time the orange up arrow light stays on, and hence a much more responsive tag manager, especially when the number of tags is large and auto-update interval is short.

You don't need to do anything for this change to be applied to your Tag Manager, but a power cycle will not hurt to make sure this change has been applied.
Comment