41 replies to this topic

[Ton Plomp]

Every version of LabVIEW going back at least to 3.0 has had a bug fix release. There's nothing new about the 2009 one except that we called it a service pack. It's curious that you mention 8.6's stability. By the CAR count, 2009 was more stable than 8.6. But these sorts of things are subjective to the parts of LabVIEW that affect you daily, so different customers may have experiences that vary greatly from the objective count.

In case you haven't heard, LV 2011 is going to be largely a stability release. The entire LV team, acting on requests from customers, is going to pull back on features, focusing on bugs, performance and integration between existing features. There will be very little that is new in LV 2011, but we think customers will want it nonetheless.

I hope the NI LabVIEW sales department didn't went to the Business of Software 2009 conference and saw this (great) speech by Joel Spolsky.
The following still is at 25:31 and I quote:

The correlation between features and sales is

Ton

[John Lokanis]

You might want to know about this bug before you upgrade.

Also, beware of projects that create .NET assemblies.

Oh, and every now and then, my IDE will switch from English to Chinese for no apparent reason.

Edited by John Lokanis, 31 August 2010 - 09:38 PM.

[jgcode]

Oh, and every now and then, my IDE will switch from English to Chinese for no apparent reason.

Nice!
I am having the same thing will my builds at the moment (but in LV2009)
I wonder if it is related?

[jcarmody]

I'm experiencing crashes while working with the Probe Watch window.

[SuperS_5]

Sorry for bringing up a old post, but I couldn't find anything similar, and seamed like a good place.
I have been seeing some issues with LV2010, when saving->closing->reopening a VI. Sometimes some objects are moved on the BD and/or the FP. It is very hard to trace down because it appears to be random. Sometimes after loading a VI, things are moved. After fixing, and saving, then reloading, most times it is OK, but sometimes it too has moved objects. It gets really annoying when the BD becomes unreadable, or the FP no longer looks nice.

[Aristos Queue]

Sorry for bringing up a old post, but I couldn't find anything similar, and seamed like a good place.
I have been seeing some issues with LV2010, when saving->closing->reopening a VI. Sometimes some objects are moved on the BD and/or the FP. It is very hard to trace down because it appears to be random. Sometimes after loading a VI, things are moved. After fixing, and saving, then reloading, most times it is OK, but sometimes it too has moved objects. It gets really annoying when the BD becomes unreadable, or the FP no longer looks nice.

The right place to post this is over at http://forums.ni.com in the LabVIEW forum where an AE can see the post and start investigating it or searching for an existing bug report. You probably won't get very far unless you can post a VI / VI hierarchy that demonstrates the problem (fixing that sort of bug without a replication case is probably impossible). There are AEs working Mon-Tues-Wed this week, but not Thurs-Fri (company holidays).

[SuperS_5]

Thanks for the redirection. Unfortually this problem has been very sporatic, and I am bairly able to notice it, except when it really messes up things. I am still attempting to make it reproducable.

[bsvingen]

In case you haven't heard, LV 2011 is going to be largely a stability release. The entire LV team, acting on requests from customers, is going to pull back on features, focusing on bugs, performance and integration between existing features. There will be very little that is new in LV 2011, but we think customers will want it nonetheless.

Excellent. Just now started with labview 2010 (SP1), and I find it slow and unstable. I remember 7.1, that was a good one, and 2009 is not so bad either. When is 2011 planned to be released?

[rolfk]

Excellent. Just now started with labview 2010 (SP1), and I find it slow and unstable. I remember 7.1, that was a good one, and 2009 is not so bad either. When is 2011 planned to be released?

As always with new versions, during the NI week conference in the first or second week of August. Expect to be able to download it during or after NI week and to see MSP shipments of disks a few weeks later. I didn't install 2010 and waited for SP1 but can't say that it seems slower or less stable than 2009 or 8.6, except that the installation took almost forever, (like 12 hours and more for the developer suite installation and another evening/night for the device drivers and then another evening/night for the SP1 update). I account it largely to the three year old Windows installation that holds among other things all versions of LabVIEW since 5.1.

[Cat]

I didn't install 2010 and waited for SP1 but can't say that it seems slower or less stable than 2009 or 8.6,

Having gone straight from 8.6.1 to 2010SP1, all I can say is that I am now spending a LOT of time watching the cursor twirl endlessly and looking at "LabVIEW not responding" messages. And this is just while doing normal things, not any large data set memory intensive things.

except that the installation took almost forever, (like 12 hours and more for the developer suite installation and another evening/night for the device drivers and then another evening/night for the SP1 update). I account it largely to the three year old Windows installation that holds among other things all versions of LabVIEW since 5.1.

Just installing the professional development system and drivers took 3 hours. On a brand-spanking new computer.

[JoeQ]

Having gone straight from 8.6.1 to 2010SP1, all I can say is that I am now spending a LOT of time watching the cursor twirl endlessly and looking at "LabVIEW not responding" messages. And this is just while doing normal things, not any large data set memory intensive things.


Just installing the professional development system and drivers took 3 hours. On a brand-spanking new computer.

I just upgraded from 5 to 2010. I am using a P4 3Ghz PC with XP Pro. The intall (complete Full package) took about 6 hours on this machine. Then again, I installed it on my old laptop but just did the minimum and it was done in about a half hour.

It is very slow to develop code with it now compared to 5 and 6. Selecting save as, for example, took 50 seconds before I got the file menu. The long times are not constant. Sometimes save can return the menu in 10 seconds or so. Pressing undo, I may as well get a coffee.

VI's will run fine, then freeze for a second or so, then run for a while then freeze again. I found if I turned off the NI Webserver that it seemed to solve it. No freezes with a few hours of run time. I have not tried to restart the PC again and see of the problem returns.

The new 3D graphs look very nice compared to the old ones but I was hoping to see a lot more modern looking controls in the library.

[Jordan Kuehn]

I just upgraded from 5 to 2010. I am using a P4 3Ghz PC with XP Pro. The intall (complete Full package) took about 6 hours on this machine. Then again, I installed it on my old laptop but just did the minimum and it was done in about a half hour.

It is very slow to develop code with it now compared to 5 and 6. Selecting save as, for example, took 50 seconds before I got the file menu. The long times are not constant. Sometimes save can return the menu in 10 seconds or so. Pressing undo, I may as well get a coffee.

VI's will run fine, then freeze for a second or so, then run for a while then freeze again. I found if I turned off the NI Webserver that it seemed to solve it. No freezes with a few hours of run time. I have not tried to restart the PC again and see of the problem returns.

The new 3D graphs look very nice compared to the old ones but I was hoping to see a lot more modern looking controls in the library.

I haven't experienced any of these issues you describe. Running LV2010 on both my desktop and laptop. Perhaps something is wrong with your machine.

As far as modern looking controls, I find myself using the system controls a lot. They look nice in windows 7 and decent in XP. There's also a few controls suites in the package manager that are nice.

[neil]

Rant time... (sorry)
Slowdowns! Damn you...

Been tinkering away at a project for about a month now, and the IDE has just gotten slower and slower and slower... Simple wire edits take several seconds to execute. This is LV2010 SP1 32-bit on Win7 (64-bit).

<sorry for yelling> WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON BEHIND THE SCENES LABVIEW </very sorry>

Seriously, this is on a quad core i950 with 8 gigs of RAM. I can play the latest 3D game at > 60 fps but I cannot delete a wire from my BD without waiting several seconds?

Of course, the well known work-around of closing the project and opening just the .lvlib I am currently using makes all these problems go away. What is going on with the Project? What is is constantly updating behind the scenes. I have checked that I have no excessively big VIs, perhaps a dozen smaller classes, one reasonably big (super-cluster type) class.

Note: I am using (and liking) Class Property nodes, could this be slowing things down?

NI guys: is there any kind of profiling I can do to see what is slowing everything down? Please don't ask me to box up my project and sent it to NI, there are dozens if not hundreds of people on both forums complaining of these problems, surely you are noticing it as well internally?

I love LabVIEW to bits, but things like this are just so frustrating.

Have not been brave enough to install 2011 beta on my dev machine, does anyone know if this "stability release" actually fixes any of these performance problems?

Rant over...

[mike5]

Rant time... (sorry)
Slowdowns! Damn you...

Been tinkering away at a project for about a month now, and the IDE has just gotten slower and slower and slower... Simple wire edits take several seconds to execute. This is LV2010 SP1 32-bit on Win7 (64-bit).

I'm also using LV2010 SP1 32-bit on Win7 64-bit. I have a project with over 500 VIs all neatly packed in lvclasses, and I'm not seeing your type of problems. The only slowdown I see is when I change targets (PC/RT), when the entire project needs to recompile. Besides that I pretty regularly use the "Save all" button on the project, and there is no slow response from that.

Just a thought - do you "separate compiled code from source file"? I have this marked on all my files - maybe this makes a difference...

Br, Miha

[neil]

I'm also using LV2010 SP1 32-bit on Win7 64-bit. I have a project with over 500 VIs all neatly packed in lvclasses, and I'm not seeing your type of problems. The only slowdown I see is when I change targets (PC/RT), when the entire project needs to recompile. Besides that I pretty regularly use the "Save all" button on the project, and there is no slow response from that.

Just a thought - do you "separate compiled code from source file"? I have this marked on all my files - maybe this makes a difference...

Br, Miha

I regularly do a forced save all (ctrl-shift run), and that takes a bit of time but not too much.

OK, I have just tried the separate compiled code and it seems to have made a massive difference, great tip!

Will do a bit more editing and report back on progress...

[crelf]

<sorry for yelling> WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON BEHIND THE SCENES LABVIEW </very sorry>

Cranky, yet you continue to remain polite - you must be English.

[jdunham]

Rant time... (sorry)
Slowdowns! Damn you...

Been tinkering away at a project for about a month now, and the IDE has just gotten slower and slower and slower... Simple wire edits take several seconds to execute. This is LV2010 SP1 32-bit on Win7 (64-bit).

<sorry for yelling> WHAT THE HE..

One thing I have seen intermittently with our large project is that using Ctrl-F in the Project Window to search for VIs by name can result in the system slowing down until LabVIEW is shut down. In this state, most mouse clicks take several seconds, and any time a different window is selected, the Z-order of my open windows is shuffled in a seemingly random way, which takes 30-90 seconds to sort itself out and accept any more mouse or keyboard input.

However it only happens sometimes, and the link to control-F is only suspected, not proven, so I've been having trouble reproducing it for a support ticket. Have you seen anything like that?

Edited by jdunham, 12 July 2011 - 08:03 PM.

[Mr Mike]

Note: I am using (and liking) Class Property nodes, could this be slowing things down?

Hello Neil. Sorry that you're having trouble with the speed of LV 2010. I'm not sure what the issue is (I haven't been tracking problems with 2010 other than the ones I wrote ), but you might be able to get help on the official LabVIEW forums, since we have customer support there. LAVA is just where some LabVIEW developers come to play.

As to your question about LabVIEW Class Property Nodes. I'm glad you're using them and liking them. They shouldn't slow anything down at runtime because under the covers they behave just like a bunch of SubVI calls in a row. They shouldn't slow anything down at edit time because they act like regular properties on a property node. I haven't heard anything (good or bad) about the performance of LabVIEW Class Property Nodes, but if you discover they're slowing something down, please definitely let me / NI know.

[mje]

...any time a different window is selected, the Z-order of my open windows is shuffled in a seemingly random way...

I've seen this behavior in other circumstances, but never been able to pin it down. Often it's when creating a swathe of accessor methods for a new class when dozens of new VI windows are created. I then enter a mindless loop of Ctrl+W followed by Enter key strokes to close and save them all, but sometimes, the z-order gets all messed up and tracking down the new VIs becomes cumbersome.

I've learned to modify my behavior since then, any time I'm mass creating methods, I close out everything save for the project explorer so my windows don't get lost.

In other news, won't be long until the "Usability" 2011 IDE is out!

I'll also point out that my previous project suffered from slow downs as well. It had (I think) 1800 VIs, and doing any diagram editing caused the IDE to lock up for just under a second. It was cumbersome. I'm only realizing now since I've moved on to another project and don't (yet) have the slow downs how much it affected my throughput. Also compile times are back down too! New projects are fun.

[Yair]

One thing I have seen intermittently with our large project is that using Ctrl-F in the Project Window to search for VIs by name can result in the system slowing down until LabVIEW is shut down. In this state, most mouse clicks take several seconds, and any time a different window is selected, the Z-order of my open windows is shuffled in a seemingly random way, which takes 30-90 seconds to sort itself out and accept any more mouse or keyboard input.

However it only happens sometimes, and the link to control-F is only suspected, not proven, so I've been having trouble reproducing it for a support ticket. Have you seen anything like that?

I have seen similar things with 8.6 and 2009. This happened to me just yesterday with 8.6, and I believe I can describe it like this:

I think it was the first time after opening the IDE. Searching for something (I think I used Find All Instances on a subVI) opens the find window and does the search. When the search reaches the last VIs, LV becomes unresponsive for a few seconds and then the windows are shuffled around and the find window is no longer in focus. I'm not sure if this also happens on subsequent searches. I tried it now and it didn't happen.