Cat

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.

If the requirement is not to specifically make a *.xls file, but rather just a file that Excel can read, the easiest way to do this is to make a Comma Separated Variable (*.csv) file from your data. Then you don't have to fool around with ActiveX or .Net or anything like that. So, for example, your time file would end up looking something like timeToThreshold1, timeToStop1, duration1 timeToThreshold2, timeToStop2, duration2 timeToThreshold3, timeToStop3, duration3 ...

While I'm waiting on software and hardware to try out Shaun's and Mark's suggestions, I've been porting my 32-bit code to a 64-bit machine and rebuilding. While maintaining 2 different versions of my code is not necessarily a *good* solution to my problem, it is *a* solution, anyway. So, I ran my 64-bit executable. I loaded up 8 plots, no problem. Clicked on the 9th and.... **Choke** I repeated this yesterday a couple times and always got the same result. LabVIEW not responding. In disgust I left it running over night. When I came in this morning it was running fine! I loaded up a bunch of plots with no problem! Whisky Tango Foxtrot (as they say in the Navy) ?!?! So after a few more tests, here are some numbers to quantify this problem. 1) Each plot added consistantly takes about 11MB of memory. 2) After plot8 my app is using approx 360MB memory 3) Going from plot8 to plot9 grabs 30-ish MB and that number fluctuates during the "LabVIEW Not Responding" time until it settle down to the usual 11MB 4) During this time the computer's 8 CPUs are averaging ~12% with one of them at ~65% 5) The "LabVIEW Not Responding" time is approximately ONE HOUR (!!!) After that, I've gotten 250 plots up with a minor amount of thrashing (not surprising since my current machine only has 4GB memory). Any clues about what's going on? My thought is that LV initially grabbed a bunch of memory, uses it all up at 360MB and then needs to grab more. But why in the world would that take an entire hour?? Cat

That makes sense. The install prompts are just a little misleading. Thanks! And here I was fully prepared to not blame NI.

I'm attempting to install LabVIEW 2010 64-bit. Questions: 1) Installing LV takes way over an hour as does installing the device drivers. Is this normal? I'm thinking not, and am more than willing to blame my anti-virus software that I unfortunately can't turn off... 2) For the many installs I did (see sob story below) it was asking where I wanted LabVIEW to go and where I wanted other NI components to go. Sometimes the default was "C:\Program Files\...". Sometimes it was "C:\Program Files (x86)\..." Which one of these is "right"? Or does it even matter? 3) I searched in vain for a 64-bit device driver download on the NI site. If it's really there, can someone point me in the right direction? If not, is it okay to use the 32-bit driver disk that came in the mail? Long, sad, sob story: I was tearing my hair out yesterday trying to install LV2010. I need to recompile my 32 bit code with 64 bit LabVIEW and see if that helps with performance issues I've been having. I had downloaded and installed SP1 a few days ago and then gotten the disks in the mail. Being the anal-retentive type, I figured I should reinstall from the disks. So I uninstalled, then reinstalled. So I run my newly installed LV and when the splash screen comes up it says it's running the 32-bit version. NI sent me 32-bit LabVIEW. Grrrrr. When you install the 64-bit version, it says that in the menubar. The 32-bit version is silent on the matter. So uninstall and reinstall the original downloaded 64-bit version. Another 3 hours shot... But even tho I left it at the default "C:\Program Files\...", a bunch of NI stuff is still installed in "C:\Program Files (x86)\..." Which is what triggered this post. I would like all the NI stuff to be in one spot, but that may just be my anal-retentive nature again.

This may be too trivial of an answer for your application, but you can just right click on a cluster element, select Create-> Reference, and a reference to the cluster element appears on your BD. No casting necessary.

If you are dealing with large amounts of data, memory is going to be a real problem. It gets even worse if you're plotting it. Why? 1) LV doesn't handle large data sets well, and 2) 8.6 (the version you have listed) isn't "large address aware" Check out the following if you're using a built app: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/1203A9B2930B7961862576F00058F94E (thanks to mesmith here for that link. I haven't had a chance to check out the suggestions he or ShaunR made yet) IOW, sure, getting a faster CPU should help with number crunching, but optimizing memory use will go far, too.

No, trust me, most of the folks here build their own computers from the ground up, so we know how to spec these things out. Old computer: Intel Pentium M, 1.73 GHz, 1.49GB RAM New computer Intel i7, 3GHz, 8GB 1333MHz DDR3

You're probably right. It would be kinda annoying to have to log in and out all the time just to clear that stuff out, tho. But! I did figure out that if I hit the "Mark all items as read" then exit my browser, when I come back in it's all cleaned up.

Heroes! Whether they are "just doing their job" or not.

Absolutely nothing of technical merit to add here, but I can not believe you actually used the words "ShaunR" and "shy" in the same sentence.

What jgcode said -- unless the popup is being generated by something other than LabVIEW (or other code you have control over)?

And on the flip side... I fire up LAVA this morning and there were 15 unread posts. I wade thru them, noticing their icons go from "unread" to "read" as I do, but don't disappear. So now when I click on the "View Unread Content" button, I get a page of 15 read posts. And yes, I've closed my browser and reopened it a couple times and it doesn't matter. By definition, shouldn't only unread posts be listed on a page called "Unread Content"??

I've got an app that reads in and displays spectra files. When I wrote it originally eons ago, it was running on a laptop running WinXP, 32-bit, 2 GB memory. It could pull in 20-ish spectra (~1MB per spectra) before blowing up. We recently got some hot mini desktops for the analysts. Windows 7, 64 bit, 8GB memory. I was all excited to see how many plots could be displayed at one time (the analysts would like an infinite number). It choked on 10 plots. Lots of "LabVIEW not reponding" errors and eventually had to abort the application (with only 2.2 GB mem actually being used). I'm wondering if I've just been bitten with the real world problem of running a 32-bit app on a 64-bit machine. Maybe Win7 eats up tons of that lower memory, leaving less for 32-bit apps. I'll load LV10 on a 64-bit box, and rebuild the app to test out this theory. This kinda sux for my current development paths, tho. I really DO NOT want to move from v8.6.1 to v9 or 10 (sorry NI, I love ya, but...) and 8.6.1 doesn't come in 64-bit. I'm pinning my hopes on a stable LV11, but that's a year away (never upgrade until the first SP). Anywho, just wondering if anyone else out there who works with memory-hogging apps has had this problem running a 32-bit LV app on a 64-bit machine.

Answered over here

PaulG asked me how I was doing on a complainer thread I started over on Site Feedback. I figured I'd answer here. I'm hanging in there. The pain is getting a little less every day. Which is a good direction for it to be going. I go back to see the dr next week and hopefully he clears me to start physical thereapy. Thanks for asking!

Thanks, Yair!

Sheesh. First day back and I'm already complaining... So, I started up LAVA today and had 115 unread posts. I go to LAVA Lounge and read all the unread posts there, first (of course!). I go back to all Unread Content and it tells me there are now only 5 unread messages. I don't think there were 110 unread Lounge messages, so I'm thinking I'm missing a whole lot of unread content. I think I've noticed this happening before, in the past couple months, but I usually keep up a lot better so have just had a few posts disappear (I know they haven't actually disappeared). I would go to the last 24 hours button, but I can't since it's been 2 weeks.

Wow, François! Congrats! Great picture!

My back and I are back! Many thanks all for the well-wishes. I really appreciated them. The surgery went fine. I then, of course, over did it afterwards and set recovery back a little, but I learned my lesson and am taking it a little easier now. Sure enough, there is a bit of residual pain from nerve damage. That will just take awhile to go away. I'm weaning myself off the vicodin... Sitting still hurts but I've put my dev computer up on a box on my workbench so I can program standing up.

That would be a lumbar microdiscectomy, to be exact. Yup, today I am getting my back opened up and parts of my spinal column removed. I have had a herniated disk (well, a couple actually, but only one that's currently causing a lot of trouble) for almost a year now. It was bad, got better, then at the beginning of last December got much worse. I have been thru therapy, oral steroids, epidural cortisone shots, etc. Nothing seems to be working, so it's time to get out the knife. I am currently on more opiates than House. The big difference between me and House, tho, is that he's a fictional charcter and doesn't actually feel pain. I, on the other hand, still hurt like h3ll. Hopefully that will be all over in a few hours. Well, mostly over anyway, as I've been told there has probably been nerve damage and there will be residual pain/tingling/numbness from that for quite some time. But it should be much better than it is now. I'm not sure what the recovery time will be like. I can't come back to work for 2 weeks. I'm not supposed to sit for more than 30 min at a time. At the moment, sitting is very painful and I'm lucky to get 10 min in a chair before the pain becomes too severe. That would be why I haven't been on LAVA much -- it's hard to type when you're walking around. This is a routine procedure (for my surgeon, anyway ) and if all goes well I should be back home tonite. Keep your fingers crossed for me! Cat

Yup, it's all Shaun's fault. No, seriously, this is a great discussion and I'm just waiting for the dust to settle a little. As for my own applications, while I like John's approach, anything that runs any sort of web services is a no-no. The Information Assurance Security Gods will rise up and smite me. I'm actually in the midst of turning a perfectly fine functioning webpage into a standard UI interface to get rid of a bunch of "IA deficiencies" on our Solaris side.

Congrats, and thanks for all the posts! Looking forward to seeing what text you put under your picture...

A great thread over here on Best Practices brings up something I have occasionally wondered about -- the concept of decoupling the UI from the code. While I grasp the concept philosophically, I'm trying to figure out what it looks like in practice. I'm not sure if this is just a fancy term for something I already do (as "plug-in architecture" turned out to be), or if it's something I should be looking at doing. Does anyone have some code they don't mind offering up that would be a good example of decoupling the UI? Cat

I was wearing my Devil's Advocate hat when I wrote that. Shaun was talking about messiness, and I had just done some wiring on an event case that would have looked a lot neater if I would have used a couple local variables. But I know that's a no-no.