The behavior in the Runtime

The project can be operated from the server and from all the clients in absolutely the same way. Generally speaking, the user cannot tell if he works on the server or on a client.

But only the server of the project has a connection to the hardware and administers the process data. I.e. the clients get the current values of the variables, the system messages of the Chronologic Event List, alarm information, recipes and archived data only from the server. This is done spontaneously and event triggered.

With the standard settings the network service (zenNetSrv.exe) of each client sends a watchdog to the network service (zenNetSrv.exe) of the server all 10 seconds during online operation. If the server responds to at least one of the three watchdogs within the 30 seconds, the client assumes that the network connection is working.

This standard setting can be changed in the Editor in the network configuration. In the section Network of the project properties you will find the property Timeout, which is set to 30 seconds as a default.