Should i trim controller channels?

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fabiousa7

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Just wondering if it is best practice to trim out the channels in my controller to match exactly what is in use, or just leave all at 510?
 

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General guidelines:

The less data you send on your network, the happier your network will be.
The more you fill the universes, the happier your network will be.
Leaving the E1.31 PDUs partially filled will make your network sad.
 
MartinMueller2003 said:
General guidelines:

The less data you send on your network, the happier your network will be.
The more you fill the universes, the happier your network will be.
Leaving the E1.31 PDUs partially filled will make your network sad.
Click to expand...
Makes sense thanks, but what do you mean by:

"Leaving the E1.31 PDUs partially filled will make your network sad."

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk
 
Every Ethernet packet has overhead needed to route the packet through the network. More packets with less data means more network processing for less useful data transferred through the network. E1.31 packets packed full means fewer packets transferred through the network which means the network does not have to work as hard to transfer the same amount of data. I do use some E1.31 in my show and the E1.31 packets are as full as possible (512 bytes each) and only the last universe is partially filled. I do NOT associate a universe to an output port on a controller. I associate a set of universes to a contrlloer and then have the controller partition the data to the ports.
 
PDU is the universe data that is sent over the network. One PDU per universe.
If you have unused channels in the middle of used channels on the same universe you are sending them as blank channel data as well.
 
MrDudeMan said:
PDU is the universe data that is sent over the network. One PDU per universe.
If you have unused channels in the middle of used channels on the same universe you are sending them as blank channel data as well.
Click to expand...
Sorry. My networking background filtering through.

PDU = Protocol Data Unit.

E1.31 sends one universe time slice (aka frame) in a single PDU. If you have ten universes defined, it takes ten PDUs to send one time period's worth of data. At 40 frames per second for ten universes, you send 40 * 10 PDUs each second. In my show I have 150 universes. If I start to waste space in a PDU then I end up adding a lot of traffic.

All switches, routers and WiFi APs have a pps (Packet per second = PDU per second) rating. That along with the number of bytes in the PDUs controls the actual throughput of the network.

For example, if I have a device with a 1000 pps rating if I put 10 bytes of useful data in the PDUs then I have a network with an effective carrying capacity of 10,000 bytes per second. If I put 1000 bytes in each PDU, then I get a network with 1,000,000 Bytes per second carrying capacity. If you look at E1.31, it tops out at 512 bytes per PDU. As a protocol E1.31 hobbles the network to half of its potential capacity. DDP is much better because it stuffs the PDUs as full as possible (1200 byte payloads and ignoring jumbo frames) making the network usage as efficient as possible.

For the network purists, I have intentionally left out interframe gap, header overhead, VLAN headers, checksums and a host of other factors that really should be in an accurate description of network overhead.
 
MartinMueller2003 said:
Every Ethernet packet has overhead needed to route the packet through the network. More packets with less data means more network processing for less useful data transferred through the network. E1.31 packets packed full means fewer packets transferred through the network which means the network does not have to work as hard to transfer the same amount of data. I do use some E1.31 in my show and the E1.31 packets are as full as possible (512 bytes each) and only the last universe is partially filled. I do NOT associate a universe to an output port on a controller. I associate a set of universes to a contrlloer and then have the controller partition the data to the ports.
Click to expand...

This was helpful.
Just to validate my understanding.
I have a new powerbox/controller i'll be using for my new arches 5x150pixel each, so following your recommendation i have each universe with 512 channels and then broke down the only used ports from the bottom up using every available channel.

Is this correct?

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Last question (on this topic)

Is it okay to leave the other universes assigned to this controller or should i zero them out until i need them?
(i plan to use this controller for mini-trees next year)
 

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If you send out the unused data, you are sending a message to the elves that you need more light strings and props.
 
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