SubVIs calling subVIs that need to be reentrant - what level needs to be reentrant?

[george seifert]

I have a subVI that calls subVIs that in turn call other subVIs. I need to be able to run the top level subVI in parallel with itself. At what level do I need to use reentrancy - just at the top level or do all the subVIs down to the lowest level all need to be reentrant?

George

[crossrulz]

My understanding is that for true parallelism all of the subVIs should be reentrant. If you have VIs that are really short/fast, you could possibly get away with not making them reentrant to save a little memory. I will throw out the warning to be careful about VIs that need to maintain state (FGVs, Action Engines, whatever you want to call them) and reentrancy.

[GregR]

There are a lot of considerations when deciding which VIs to make reentrant. Its about finding a balance between maximum performance and minimum memory usage.

• Any VI that maintains state needs to be either non-reentrant or fully reentrant depending on its requirements for that state.
  
• If there are any VIs that truly can't be called at the same time, those should stay non-reentrant. This could be things like configuration dialogs or file modification. Non-reentrant VIs are one of the easiest ways to serialize access to single instance resources.
  
• Any VI that is part of a performance critical code path probably should be made fully reentrant. This avoids synchronization points between multiple parallel instances of performance critical code or non-performance critical code getting in the way of performance critical code.
  
• Beyond that you can start to favor non-reentrant or shared reentrant to reduce memory usage.
  
• As crossrulz said, VIs that always execute quickly can be considered for leaving as non-reentrant. Keep in mind that there is a difference between a VI that always executes quickly and one that typically executes quickly. Anything that does asynchronous communication (networking, queues, ...) should be considered slow, because it could take longer than expected.
  
• Making VIs that are called from a lot of places shared reentrant instead of fully reentrant will slightly increase execution time but can greatly reduce the number of instances required and thus memory usage.