Kudos to the NI R&D team for the new start time

[Michael Aivaliotis]

I just want to revive this thread and say a big Booo! to NI for slowing LabVIEW down agian. After applying the new 8.2.1 patch my launch time sucks. Back to 8.0 startup speed.

[Aristos Queue]

QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 22 2007, 01:53 AM)

I just want to revive this thread and say a big Booo! to NI for slowing LabVIEW down agian. After applying the new 8.2.1 patch my launch time sucks. Back to 8.0 startup speed.

Did you mass compile the directory <labview>\resource ?

Nevermind... 8.2.1 is a full installer so all the VIs ship mass compiled. I forgot about that.

I don't know what would be causing your slowdown. ... the failure to mass compile can affect my development build, but if I use a real install of 8.2.1, it's just as fast as 8.2.0.

[Dave Graybeal]

I haven't noticed a slow down in Load time on any of the pc's we have installed 8.2.1 on here either. We now have 3 PC's that are up to date with 8.2.1 and all seem to have similar load times of 8.2. There must be something else going on.

Dave Graybeal

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

I have not noticed any slow start of LV itself but I did notice that if I open a VI ( I did not write) that uses a global VI that contains many globals and the other VI's that use globals contained in the global VI ( I did not write), VI's open very slowly.

I saved all of the VI's (I did not write) and the top level VI opened much quicker.

But that all makes sense ( and is another good reason why I do not use globals).

Ben

[Michael Aivaliotis]

My stats:

LabVIEW 7.1.1: 30s

LabVIEW 8.0.1: 2m45s

LabVIEW 8.2.1: 1m30s

So, unless you can launch in 30s you're too slow for me, sorry.

I'm talking LabVIEW startup time without loading any VI's.

[crelf]

QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 24 2007, 05:36 AM)

My stats:

LabVIEW 8.20: 17s

[xtal]

Here are my launch times

LabVIEW 8.2.1 on machine with no toolkits installed: 3s

LabVIEW 8.2.1 with *all* toolkits installed: 30s

[gmart]

QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 23 2007, 02:36 PM)

My stats:

LabVIEW 7.1.1: 30s

LabVIEW 8.0.1: 2m45s

LabVIEW 8.2.1: 1m30s

So, unless you can launch in 30s you're too slow for me, sorry.

I'm talking LabVIEW startup time without loading any VI's.

I think we're missing a key metric. Where are the stats for the 8.2 launch time? I thought your original complaint was that 8.2.1 was slower than 8.2.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

QUOTE(gmart @ May 23 2007, 01:17 PM)

I think we're missing a key metric. Where are the stats for the 8.2 launch time? I thought your original complaint was that 8.2.1 was slower than 8.2.

I did not clock the 8.2 startup time when I had it before the upgrade. Sorry. I'm not about to downgrade. It felt like 30s.

As far as everyone else. That's great, I'm happy for you (I really am) but how do I debug this? Any suggestions?

[Dean Mills]

Hi Mike,

I don't think there is a way to debug this? You can try changing palettes perhaps there is something in there? When you upgraded to 8.2.1 did you reinstall the toolkits. I remember reading something somewhere warning about that.

What I did to speed it up was reinstall the OS and run only 1 LabVIEW version. I realize this is likely not an option but it will make a huge difference. My load time after reboot on LV8.2 went from 2+ minutes to 30 seconds after I reinstalled XP. Relaunching LabVIEW always starts faster as long as you don't run other programs. I also removed the LV8.0 install. All other software was the same without the left over crap of 1 year of upgrades and new versions. One other slow down I had was caused by the virus scanner getting reset and started scanning .vi's again but that was only noticeable when loading 2000+ VI's. I use vmware to support older versions but if you can't allocate 1 gig of ram to the vmware portion it runs really slow with LabVIEW and you have a large project like Meikle does.

Dean

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Well, I just finished upgrading an "old" 8.0.1 project to 8.2.1 so I don't have a need for 8.0.1 anymore. I'll uninstall this and see if it makes a difference.

[Aristos Queue]

QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 23 2007, 04:59 PM)

Well, I just finished upgrading an "old" 8.0.1 project to 8.2.1 so I don't have a need for 8.0.1 anymore. I'll uninstall this and see if it makes a difference.

Brainstorming ideas:

1) Did you change .ini files such that "load palettes in background" was changed to "load all palettes at launch"? That's an option in Tools>>Options>>Palettes.

2) Have you got a bunch of toolkits installed that aren't mass compiled? (Not that I can explain why those would be loading as part of launch.)

3) Is it at all possible that you installed 8.2.1 and then used an 8.2 on another computer to mass compile your 8.2.1 install? Or something bizzare like that?

I'm really at a loss to explain such a slowdown. Those are the only ideas that I can come up with.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

I uninstalled 8.0.1 (took 45min.!). Anyway, after a clean reboot:

821 startup: 2m30s.

Closed 821 then re opened it:

821 startup: 30s.

Worked on a project for an hour, then closed 821. Then reopened it:

821 startup: 1m

[PJM_labview]

Here are my Stats (my laptop is a about a year old or so ant it is a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz and 2.0 Gb of RAM):

  First Launch   2nd Launch(right after the first one)

LV 7.1 :   ~90s   ~4s

LV 8.0.1:   ~85s   ~9s

LV 8.2.1:   ~40s   ~4s

A couple of remarks:

1) Sometime after working on LV 8.2.1 for a while and restarting it up, start time is back up in the 40 ish seconds.

2) What did improve launch time a lot for me is frequent background defragmentations. I use a deframgmenter that once a week do a deep defragmentation that put the most used application on the fastest access location of the HD (or something like that). This make a very signifiant difference. As you can see in my stat I dont use LV 7.1 much anymore and its start time is pretty slow now.

3) In my book, ~40s for the first launch of LabVIEW 8.2.1 is still too slow. LabVIEW is definitively the slowest application to start on my pc (and it has been for quite some time now)... A first launch time in the 10-15s would be nice

[orko]

QUOTE(PJM_labview @ May 24 2007, 08:11 AM)

Here are my Stats (my laptop is a about a year old or so ant it is a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz and 2.0 Gb of RAM):

First Launch 2nd Launch(right after the first one)

LV

7.1 : ~90s ~4s

LV

8.0.1: ~85s ~9s

LV

8.2.1: ~40s ~4s

I'm getting very similar stats (~30 second first launch on 8.2.1; ~4-5 seconds after that) on my dev box, which is a dell precision 380; 2.8Ghz 1GB

A question: About half of the startup time for the first launch (~14-16 seconds) is spent on the "Converting toolkits" phase. What exactly is LabVIEW doing during this time? This may point toward the cause of most of the inititial delay.

[PJM_labview]

QUOTE(orko @ May 24 2007, 10:34 AM)

I'm getting very similar stats (~30 second first launch on 8.2.1; ~4-5 seconds after that) on my dev box, which is a dell precision 380; 2.8Ghz 1GB

A question: About half of the startup time for the first launch (~14-16 seconds) is spent on the "Converting toolkits" phase. What exactly is LabVIEW doing during this time? This may point toward the cause of most of the inititial delay.

The "Initializing Plugins" step take as long (~6s) as the "Converting toolkits" for me.

PJM

[orko]

QUOTE(PJM_labview @ May 24 2007, 08:11 AM)

2) What did improve launch time a lot for me is frequent background defragmentations. I use a deframgmenter that once a week do a deep defragmentation that put the most used application on the fastest access location of the HD (or something like that). This make a very signifiant difference. As you can see in my stat I dont use LV 7.1 much anymore and its start time is pretty slow now.

This is no joke. I just went through a disk cleanup* and defrag (used the O&O defrag trial) and my launch time of LV8.2.1 after reboot went from 32 seconds to 23! Granted, the other versions of LabVIEW probably would have also sped up, so it doesn't improve the relative benchmarks... but I'm much happier as a result. Good tip! :thumbup:

(*) as a side comment/tip, I never really liked using the XP disk cleanup tool, since it always hangs up for a long time on the "compress old files" analysis (especially since I never compress old files). Very annoying. I just found an awesome tip however from one of the knowledge bases that takes care of that little problem! http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;812248' target="_blank">KB812248 ... it now takes literally seconds to scan and clean up my old junk files!

[AnalogKid2DigitalMan]

QUOTE(orko @ May 24 2007, 12:57 PM)

This is no joke. I just went through a disk cleanup* and defrag (used the O&O defrag trial) and my launch time of LV8.2.1 after reboot went from 32 seconds to 23! Granted, the other versions of LabVIEW probably would have also sped up, so it doesn't improve the relative benchmarks... but I'm much happier as a result. Good tip! :thumbup:

(*) as a side comment/tip, I never really liked using the XP disk cleanup tool, since it always hangs up for a long time on the "compress old files" analysis (especially since I never compress old files). Very annoying. I just found an awesome tip however from one of the knowledge bases that takes care of that little problem! http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;812248' target="_blank">KB812248 ... it now takes literally seconds to scan and clean up my old junk files!

I always cleanup/defrag prior and post to any software package installation and uninstall, especially DAQmx and LabVIEW. The drives usually bleed heavily in the red.

[Neville D]

QUOTE(orko @ May 24 2007, 10:34 AM)

I'm getting very similar stats (~30 second first launch on 8.2.1; ~4-5 seconds after that) on my dev box, which is a dell precision 380; 2.8Ghz 1GB

A question: About half of the startup time for the first launch (~14-16 seconds) is spent on the "Converting toolkits" phase. What exactly is LabVIEW doing during this time? This may point toward the cause of most of the inititial delay.

I found that mass-compiling the \National Instruments\Advanced Signal Processing Toolkit sped up my launch times to near light speed!

Strange, since this folder has VI's in 7.0 without diagrams, and mass compiling should not change them.

Neville.