Having one of these connected to our mall causes a micro stutter every time it updates. It was so bad we had to remove it. It's a shame because that allowed us to minimize ups in other ways, but the spike that it caused once per second was mental. If you could make the frequency of the updates configurable/done with ingame circuitry then that would be super helpful.

I could make the frequency of updates configurable, but honestly it'd still be a pretty crappy experience in your situation, it'd just mean the stutter would happen less often. I'll add a configuration option though, it's better than nothing.

To really fix it I think I'd have to make the updates more incremental, maybe only check X number of network cells per tick or something. It'd get a little complex but seems doable, maybe I'll take a crack at it at some point. I'd need to find a good save file to test it on, though, none of my factories are really big enough to cause noticeable stutter. Do you know where I could grab one, either yours or somebody elses'?

Do you have multiple construction signalers placed in the same network? Right now all the scanning is repeated for each signaler placed in the same network, which is of course unnecessary, I could optimize that.

Or most ideally, the necessary information could be added to the network API and I could stop doing the very expensive manual scans completely. But I'm not counting on that.

We weren't using more than 1 signaler on the map.
Our base isn't that large, but we use a fair few mods.

Perhaps you could make it initiate the scan when the construction bots in a network get given a new job?

We are in a rail world map though, so it's a big map with not a lot in it.

The size of the map shouldn't directly matter much if it's mostly empty, other than I'm sure that just places more load on Factorio as a whole. For this mod, what's most important is the number of roboports in the network where you place the construction signaler (in other words, how much area that network covers).

I might have a go at doing that incremental optimization, it sounds fun. I'll try tracking down a more busy map first so that I can more easily confirm any improvement.