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Three months later... Thought I’d post on something I developed from Ravi’s Task Manager. I found I had difficulty using the Task Manager, not because there is anything wrong with it, but because the LVOOP-heavy framework I use has a ridiculously large number of subVIs loaded at any one time. The actual VIs that I’m really interested in are very few and are hard to pick out from the noise. And the massive amount of VI Server calls looking for all the potential clones of all these subVIs took forever. So in the end, I rewrote almost all of it to make it a very narrowly specialized tool that lists only the VIs I most need. These VIs are the core of what I call “Actors”, dynamically-launched VIs that communicate only through exchanging messages (here’s a post on an earlier version), so it’s called the “Actor Manager”. Here’s a screenshot where the Manager is observing three open projects, one running a TCP Server and two others as TCP clients (an earlier post on the TCP stuff is here). All the items with black dots are Actors, arranged in a tree according to who launched who. In the common launch code for actors, information about it, including what VI launched it and an optional short description of the new actor, is posted in a named notifier (name based on a clone name of a preallocated subVI used in the launch process, so that it is unique). The notifier remains in existence while the actor is running. The Actor Manager uses VI server to run a “Find Actors” VI on each open project; this VI searches through all possible notifier names. The search by notifier name is very fast, so I can search for clone names up to 10,000 on each application instance without taking much time. So, this is sort of the same as the “Task Manager”, but also totally opposite, in that it is a completely specialized tool, useless outside of the framework it’s designed for, rather than being a generally applicable tool. But that narrow focus also allows it to do its specialized task very well (being able to clearly see the tree of who launched who is very important to me). For anyone else with a similar framework (“Actor Framework”, for example, or MJE’s “MessagePump”) I can recommend making a similar tool. It took me more time to do that it should have, because at first I was trying to maintain the generality of Ravi’s Task Manager while adding specialized features too it, but that proved too difficult. So I recommend a separate tool (and also use Ravi’s excellent Manager when a general tool is needed). — James