On Tuesday 21 September 2010 13:27:50 Sagar Behere wrote:
> Hello,
>
> There is an "estimator" taskcontext which grabs inputs and from various
> other taskcontexts and calculates the current state of a truck. This
> state information is then used by other taskcontexts to drive the truck.
>
> The information from the estimator is sent out via dataports. We need to
> make a design decision regarding whether to have one dataport per
> variable, or bunch variables into structures and send the structures out
> of the ports. Is there a limit on the number of dataports a TC can have,
> before its performance starts suffering? Or is this number so large that
> we need not consider this in our design?

The only hard limit is the available memory/cpu on your system. That said, I
would group as much variables as possible in structs (use typegen to create
transports/typekits for these structs). If necessary, you'll have a certain
value present in multiple structs.

The reason you want to do this is:
* each port connnection must be made, so many ports is many connections to be
made and more chance to mistakes (forgotten connection or copy/paste error)
* each port read must be checked for NoData/OldData/NewData, which adds code
in your reading part of the code
* If you go distributed, performance would suffer from many small writes,
compared to a few big writes.

Peter