Status Tracking or $SCRIPT?

[travisdh]

Hello,

Just a hstouch efficiency question, i am running lots of different status devices in my hstouch projects, from weather updates through to system status and so on. My question is which is more efficient to use, the $SCRIPT=&hs.devicestring or the status tracking, and which is best practice to use to ensure the most efficient use of resources in keeping them updated.

Is there a benefit in using one over the other?

Thanks

[mrhappy]

Status tracking.

[$SCRIPT commands run once a second which can be very resource intensive, status tracking only updates when you reset the time/date parameter on hs.setdevicestring.

[travisdh]

Thanks for the information, because the devices I am using to run the screens are low spec, i want to make sure I am making the system as efficient as possible so that the system can function as well as possible.

In terms of the higher resource usage when using the $SCRIPT command, how does that work, i assume it is a greater resource usage on the server, as it has to get more information from each client that uses that command, but then also it is a higher resource usage on each client as it has to re-display the data every second or so.

If the $SCRIPT command is used on multiple screens, but the screens are not loaded (or displayed) does that mean it is not parsed and displayed, or it still uses resources displaying something that is not being shown on the screen?

In terms of the status tracking, it sounds like the best way then is to move my SCRIPT=&hs.devicestring items towards status tracking showing the device string, so with this based on what you were saying, as long as I set the device date/time to be updated, the device strings on hstouch should as well, but if the device string is updated, without the time/date being updated, it will not update the actual string in hstouch until such a time as the client is reset etc.

Thanks!

[mrhappy]

I understood that the [$SCRIPT commands each ran in a seperate thread so if you had 30 on a page that is 30 vb threads running at once a second. There have been a couple of requests by me and others for this frequency to be user specified.

I used to use them alot and since I have virtually stopped (I use a handful to return some URLS's for charts, these don't appear to run once a second) my problems with HSTouch have got less and less.

I don't know if unloaded screens still run the commands or not, would not be hard to test, try and put a [$SCRIPT=&hs.writelog("Test", "scrMedia")] in a label and see if it runs when HSTouch is loaded or when that screen is loaded.

I understand that the change to HSTouch so that it sent the string when the time/date parameter was reset was put in to ease congestion with data sending. I don't know if you forget the reset whether it updates or not but most plugins do the reset so you should not have a problem.