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Message Compression
The message compression compresses WinCC OA messages. Data compression means encoding information using fewer bits than an unencoded representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes.

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- Redundancy
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- Redundant network connections
  In order to achieve a better fault tolerance WinCC OA Managers can connect to other WinCC OA Managers running on different computers via redundant network connections (this means connecting through two network connections (= IP connection)).
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  The alive mechanism in WinCC OA serves for connection controlling between the single managers. Each manager sends alive messages at definable intervals.
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  Continuous improvements are made concerning the error tolerance and reliability. This page gives an overview and description of the changes. Additional information can be found in the further chapters of the documentation.
- Kubernetes Health Check
  An introduction to health checks with Kubernetes for WinCC OA.
- Message Compression
  The message compression compresses WinCC OA messages. Data compression means encoding information using fewer bits than an unencoded representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes.
- Identification Caching
  The identification caching provides you an advantage especially when using remote user interfaces and distributed systems. Identification caching allows the identification to be sent as “delta” instead of the whole identification. Thus, only the changes are sent by the Data and the Dist managers.
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Message Compression

The message compression compresses WinCC OA messages. Data compression means encoding information using fewer bits than an unencoded representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes.

Compression is useful because it reduces the consumption of expensive resources, such as transmission bandwidth.

Use the config entry ”messageCompression” to specify the compression scheme. The config entry may contain the following schemes:

"none" (no compression), (default value is "" meaning "none")
"zlib" (compression using zlib (gzip, zip)), see http://www.zlib.org
"bzip2" (compression by using the bzip2 algorithm (bzip2 is a freely available, high-quality data compressor, see http://www.bzip.org). "bzip2 compresses better than zlib at the cost of higher CPU utilization.
or
"zlib-bzip2" (compresses short messages using zlib and bigger messages like Identification using bzip2)

You can use the config entry in all config file sections.

You can specify several schemes, for example, messageCompression = "zlib-bzip2,zlib". The client and the server agree on the first common scheme. Therefore, if you configure "zlib" on the client and "bzip,zlib" on the server, the "zlib" scheme is used. The default value is "none" and we recommend to use "zlib-bzip2".

The message compression compresses WinCC OA messages only as of a specific minimum size to avoid unnecessary CPU load. Specify the size in bytes using the config entry ”messageCompressionThreshold” (Default 0). You can use the config entry in all config file sections. The message compression provides a considerable advantage by reducing the consumption of transmission bandwidth noticeable, even in case of small messages. The default value 0 compresses all messages as long as the compression provides an advantage (sometimes compressed data might be bigger than uncompressed). The compression only compresses messages of external connections. It does not compress messages of local (computer) connections.

Use the -report dispatch option to query the compression rate. 20 % means that the message compression compressed a message to 1/5 of the original size. The rate results from the size of the transmitted reference data divided by the size of the not compressed data.