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You've got the right surname to be talking about patterns.  Sounds like you need to consider using something like the Abstract Factory pattern.
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This one has puzzled me before.
Valves, pumps, and the like sound very concrete, yet they want to call it an abstract factory?
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I know. It's a really crappy name. Really really crappy.
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Nooooo. It is a good name, though just as good and maybe better would be static factory. The factory itself is usually a class with only static methods, so it should be static (or abstract, though static is perhaps the more academically pleasing choice since it's not intended as a base class for concrete factories but rather just a bunch of static members relating to the same thing). So even though the products of the factory are concrete, the factory itself isn't.
Pump p = Factory.CreatePump(...);
not
Factory f = new Factory();
Pump p = f.CreatePump(...);
Normalement.
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This[^] message explains my problem with the name. I prefer the static name you suggest though - it sounds better.
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Luc Pattyn wrote: yet they want to call it an abstract factory?
What are you guys talking about? Isn't the pattern supposed to use the implementation of an abstract class for the factory and the user derives from it implementing the concrete factories? Or am I not remembering the pattern correctly?
led mike
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You are remembering it correctly. It's just a name that I have a problem with just because it sounds like you can directly instantiate abstract classes. I'm not sure what they should call it, but I've had staff being confused about this when they complain about their code not working because it's abstract.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: but I've had staff being confused about this when they complain about their code not working because it's abstract.
Sorry to hear that. On the bright side at least you work with people that use the word "Abstract"! That's more than I can say! 
led mike
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led mike wrote: at least you work with people that use the word "Abstract"! That's more than I can say!
Ouch. 
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Dude, it looks like you are being stalked by a 2.0 voter? Even I don't have a stalker! 
led mike
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led mike wrote: Dude, it looks like you are being stalked by a 2.0 voter? Even I don't have a stalker!
Damn. I'm not even worthy of a Univoter.
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I often accidentally vote 2.... when a little spaced out it is far too easy to think, as you arrive at the last message, that those numbers represent pages. So I try to navigate to page 2, and get "thank you for voting"..!
I must apologize to any victims (none today tho). 
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Hi,
We have a whole bunch of PC's that monitor other machines (We're talking about 30-40 monitors PC's tracking 1 machine each)
I'm planning on writing a 'dash board' app that provides a manager with a live view of the state of all the machines. I can't seem to think of a good way to architect it.
Options:
1) PULL - Monitor app exposes a web service (or some other connection type, remoting or whatever) and the dash board app calls it to get the current status. Problem, will need to be called around once a second to be live enough, this could be an issue if lots of managers have the app open watching the status. number of pull requests required will be (running_dash_board_app_count * monitor_app_count)
2) PUSH - Dash board app subscribes in some way to notifications. Monitor app pushes out notifications (via web services/remoting whatever) to dash board app. Again, same issue, notifications will need to be pushed out around once a second, so the network traffic could get really high. Notifications messages will again be (running_dash_board_app_count * monitor_app_count).
What other options are there. I don't want to flood the network with stacks of traffic just pushing or pulling status updates. This doesn't scale at all, say we had 20 managers, each new machine will add 20 new connections.
Simon
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Push: Monitor app is stateful, has to handle registrations, throttling and all sorts of BS. Saves a request packet on updates, perhaps 1% of the total bandwidth.
hence, Pull: Use this method.
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Mark Churchill wrote: Push: Monitor app is stateful, has to handle registrations, throttling and all sorts of BS. Saves a request packet on updates, perhaps 1% of the total bandwidth.
All good points thanks, so yes, pull is favourable over push. But surely there's a better way.
5 monitors & 5 dash boards = 25 messages every second (1 group within the company)
50 monitors & 50 dash boards = 2500 messages every second (Expected load across the whole company with current deployment of monitors)
500 monitors & 50 dash boards = 25000 messages every second (expected load in a few years when we reach the planned state of having all machines being monitored)
And this is making an assumption about concurrency. There's a good chance a lot of people will want leave the dash board open to keep track of things, this could push the total dash board apps running way up. Also, yes there could be some reduction by allowing the dash board to only display the particular subset of machines each user was most interested in.
Is there really no way I can reduce the network traffic? it just seems so un-scalable. These monitors aren't heavy server boxes, they're piddly little SFF PCs that just about manage winxp & .net. (Am I worrying unnecessarily? is 25000 messages a second tiny compared to general network bandwidth.)
Simon
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What data do you have per monitored machine? "Up"? Could be something that could be pulled in one request for all monitored machines (or the subset the user is interested in).
If the bandwidth/total messages a second is too much to handle and you are pushing these limits, then you'll just have to go with broadcast, push, or a stateful service (GetState(monitoredSet) GetChanges(monitoredSet)). I'd be inclined to do the latter using WCF, its probably the easiest.
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Cheers Mark, Led Mike has come up with the idea of a server in the middle to gather the data and reduce the network load on the monitors. Is this what you were getting at with your idea of "pulled in one request for all monitored machines"?
Mark Churchill wrote: broadcast
I'm interested in this idea. Is it possible for all the monitors to simply broadcast their state, and each dash board to listen without increasing the bandwidth? I've not really thought about this kind of communication. How would I go about doing this. Is it something that WCF supports?
Simon
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Sorry, I assumed that the "monitor app" was some sort of aggregation server anyway 
I was working on the assumption that the monitor app would be pinging/receiving some sort of data from the monitored machines.
Then several dashboard apps would pull data from the monitor app. By "pulled in one request" I mean that the dashboard could ask the server for an entire snapshot of state in one request, and then (if bandwidth was going to be an issue) after that ask for a difference. I was suggesting this over dashboards subscribing/having data pushed from the monitor server.
I wasnt too concerned about how the monitored things updated the monitor app. I could see that being a variety of methods, such as the monitor app pinging them, or servers pushing info onto message queues.
I dont think WCF specifically supports broadcast (I might be wrong here, I didnt check) - but i think MSMQ does. If you are on a LAN and your router supports it I guess you could save some bandwidth with UDP broadcast, but I think we'd be in overkill territory there :P
But I agree with Mike, I think the "monitor app"/ aggregation server is a given (for a start it gives you centralised logging / stats if you need them). It also lets your dashboard clients request only the data they are interested in. TBH it could probably just dump your info in a SQL database and have the dashboards request them out, or even use dependancies...
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Mark Churchill wrote: Sorry, I assumed that the "monitor app" was some sort of aggregation server anyway [Wink]
I was working on the assumption that the monitor app would be pinging/receiving some sort of data from the monitored machines.
Ahh, maybe I explained it badly. Each monitor app is running on a standalone PC that is connected to 1 machine. It receives several inputs from the machine which are things like production speed, temperature, etc. The connection from the PC to the machine is via a serial port connection to the machines PLC. (The monitor app actually serves 2 purposes, the first is to display the monitored data visually, but also allows some control of the machine via a touch screen interface)
Mark Churchill wrote: I dont think WCF specifically supports broadcast (I might be wrong here, I didnt check) - but i think MSMQ does. If you are on a LAN and your router supports it I guess you could save some bandwidth with UDP broadcast, but I think we'd be in overkill territory there [Poke tongue]
Yeah, although I like the idea of a broadcast based system, I'm thinking now it's slightly over the top, the server options seems the best.
Mark Churchill wrote: But I agree with Mike, I think the "monitor app"/ aggregation server is a given (for a start it gives you centralised logging / stats if you need them). It also lets your dashboard clients request only the data they are interested in. TBH it could probably just dump your info in a SQL database and have the dashboards request them out, or even use dependancies...
Yeah, there are plenty of advantages to a server approach. Also that would allow me to easily build in a security layer to only grant access to the appropriate people, without having to have the monitor app's aware of all the privileges, all they need to know is only to give up the data to the server.
Thanks guys, you've helped me loads. Can get cracking on a decent design now. 
Simon
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Simon Stevens wrote: But surely there's a better way.
Simon Stevens wrote: Is there really no way I can reduce the network traffic?
Perhaps you don't have each dashboard connect directly to a monitor. Instead you write a server application to do this and host it on it's own machine (not a monitor machine). The server app will communicate directly with the monitors. Then the dashboard apps communicate with the server. This might introduce small amount of latency (I don't know if that is important to you) as the server machine becomes a bottle neck, but it would reduce network connections and the load on monitor machines since they only communicate with a single remote process.
led mike
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Genius. But yet so simple, why didn't I think of that! It solves all my issues. A bit of latency is fine, so a simple server box in the middle can aggregate all the data from the monitors and provide it easily to the dash board apps without a gazillion messages flying around.
Thanks Led Mike. One big fat 5 is heading your way.
Simon
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Frankly I think you have some misconceptions about what constitutes heavy network traffic. Admittedly I don't know how much data your messages will contain but the number of messages as such doesn't seem to me as much of an issue.
If I am wrong, however... you could use some form of multicast/broadcast technique so that a monitored PC doesn't have to send the same packet to each of it's monitors. I don't know how it is done but it sure is possible. Apart from that you can do simpler things like scale back the poll frequency a bit and try to optimize the communication - use compact bitarrays instead of boolean flags, for example, and a remoting over a low-latency protocol like UDP rather than some bloated XML Web service. Remoting uses binary serialization so it's very quick as well as very compact; XML is neither (though it has it's uses of course).
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dojohansen wrote: Frankly I think you have some misconceptions about what constitutes heavy network traffic. Admittedly I don't know how much data your messages will contain but the number of messages as such doesn't seem to me as much of an issue.
I did wonder if this might be the case. My messages really should be rather small. We're talking maybe a few dozen status bit flags, a few integer values (32 bit), and a few string values (only 10 or so chars long each). And could be optimised further by only transmitting changes between each message.
It just doesn't seem very scalable, each new addition to the system adds a whole load of extra messages.
You say that the level of messages I've described is fine. Out of interest, at what point would you say I should start being concerned at the level of traffic?
Simon
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I don't know if it is fine or not; I'm just going by some very crude speculation. A second is a very long time in computing terms.
If I launch task manager and visit the networking tab, then select columns to show the number of unicasts and non-unicasts per interval, then convert this to per second (at "normal" update speed task manager appears to use an interval close to 2 seconds) I see that the activity varies a bit but is between 50 and 100 "casts" per second when idle. My network utilization varies between 0.01% and 0.03%.
Another crude thought: When loading a web page, the browser requests the document and then issues separate requests for all the linked resources, such as js files, style sheets, and above all images. It seems to me this load must be many thousand times greater than what you're trying to do, yet I am sure a much greater proportion of PCs on our corporate network than just one in thousand is browsing the web at any given time.
I don't know if there even is a general answer to your question (since network capacity might vary rather a lot in the world and you've said little about the network on which this will operate), and if there is one I don't have the knowledge to provide it. So I cannot say at what level you should be concerned. But very simple and crude common sense observations seem to me to indicate that it would be a non-issue.
I may be wrong of course, but until someone presents me with some better basis than just my own arrogant speculation I *think* adding a few bytes per second to the network traffic of each PC translates into adding less than 1% overhead to the network overall. Check your own stats, I'm sure you'll have at least a kilobyte per second in network traffic when your PC is idle!
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