Interfaces and the effects on running PLCs
The different configurations, types, and combinations of interfaces affect not only the behavior of the PLC but its performance. It is important to understand that a poorly configured data management system will result in poor PLC performance.
One of the biggest factors of this in TIA Portal is whether data is optimized or not.
Optimized data/non-optimized data
The concept of a PLC optimizing its data is not a new one. There are many PLCs that do this all the time, but Siemens has allowed programmers to choose if they want an object to be optimized or not.
Note
By default, all objects that are created in TIA Portal have optimization enabled.
Differences between optimized and non-optimized data
The main difference between optimized and non-optimized is the amount of memory that's used to store information. The following diagram shows the difference between how data is defined in a data block and how it is represented...