System requirements

The following system requirements apply for the installation and operation of this product.

Server

Sample Client

TwinCAT 2/TwinCAT 3 compatibility This documentation is valid for both the TwinCAT 2 Supplement (TS6100) and the TwinCAT 3 Function (TF6100). If there are differences in individual sub-functions, a corresponding information box indicates this directly and provides additional explanations if necessary.

Firewall port

To enable communication with the TwinCAT OPC UA Server, the following network port must be opened in the firewall of the device:

4840/tcp (incoming)

If, for example, the TwinCAT OPC UA Server is installed on a Beckhoff Industrial PC, this port must be opened as incoming communication in the operating system firewall.

Hardware requirements

The requirements of the TwinCAT OPC UA Server on the underlying industrial PC hardware depend strongly on the respective application scenario. In general, there are two metrics that are critical to server utilization:
Main memory and CPU load.

The main memory load of the server varies depending on the number of symbols that are imported into the address space of the server via the Data Access devices and on the number of simultaneous connections, subscriptions, historical access calls, ... that an OPC UA client creates. However, the basic load of the server is based on the number of symbols and can be set to about 1024 bytes per symbol. With a symbol count of 1,000,000 symbols, for example, this means a main memory use of approx.

1024 Bytes * 1.000.000 Symbole = 1.024 Mbyte

Note the main memory load of the industrial PC Please ensure that the industrial PC you are using has enough main memory.

For an initial test, you can start up your project on your engineering PC and read the main memory load of the TwinCAT OPC UA Server in the Windows Task Manager. Be aware of operating system limitations, such as the 2 GB main memory limit for 32-bit processes. This affects, for example, the 32-bit variant of the TwinCAT OPC UA Server. If you need more than 2 GB of main memory for the process, you must use the 64-bit version of the server.

The CPU load of the server, on the other hand, depends solely on the conditions prevailing at runtime, in particular the number of subscriptions and MonitoredItems and their configuration parameters that an OPC UA client requests from the server. See chapter Optimizations for more information.