Hello all,

A client is worrying (slight understatement) this morning because the Unified Client on their control room PC froze twice during production, separated by about five hours. They report that they were unable to take any action and that even after hitting the production line's Estop, the client reported that the line was running. So the client at least did not think that it had lost communication with the server runtime (INFO, the runtime is on a different computer from the control room PC).

In checking the trace viewer around the times that they report the freezes, I noticed that the screen change process looked like it was needing to try multiple times to get a screen to load, which makes me wonder if this was the freeze that was mentioned, but there was no error in the trace and even with retrying the process looks like it only took ten or fifteen seconds maximum, and although I don't have confirmation from the client, I believe the freeze lasted at least a couple of minutes for them or they wouldn't have hit an Estop. I've instructed them to tell me if it happens again and to give me as much surrounding information as possible, but I'm also trying to put out a feeler here to see if anyone has an idea of what may be happening.

The system runs WinCC Unified V19 Upd2 and has been running for a year or two (I think, it was before I came to this company) without seeing this particular issue. We did have to do an update to the SCADA earlier this week that caused the runtime to crash during startup, so I ended up removing the IM folder from the project and redownloading, which fixed the issue. I don't think that the two issues are related given that they ran for a full day on the new version with no issues, but it may be relevant.

Let me know if any other information is missing or would be helpful. I'm including the RTIL Trace Viewer logs as an attachment. The freezes happened around 5:13AM and 10:52AM based on when the Estops were hit in the Alarms History.

Thanks!

Hi,

You can try checking system resources and performance and updating the software. If everything seems correct and you're using the latest version, contact technical support.

BRCookie_M0nster

Thanks for the reply, Cookie_M0nster. I dig the handle.

I haven't heard back about any other freezes yet, but I have taken your advice and set up system information logging in the Windows Performance Monitor. We'll see if that catches anything.