LabVIEW annoyance. help( not a hater thread)

[Stuart]

Ok so now that we've got our robot working and shipped out we have been working to get things to be better and more optimized. I have read through the nI board and some LabVIEW books but I seam to have 2 small issues.

so my biggest annoyance is with the deploy all function.
A) is there any way to get the front panels on all of our sub VI's to NOT pop up when we deploy all( we have 20+,and I think its causing PTSD on my Vista laptop ).

B) from Build ,to Deploy all ,to a robot reset, it takes 5:45( yes we timed it) . . can I make this smaller . . like down below the 2:00 mark.

Any advice would be great.

[Greg McKaskle]

Are you picking the Deploy menu item from the right click menu on the Build Spec? Or is this a different menu item?

As for the build time, if you have started using analysis VIs, you may find it useful to edit the build spec deployment, click to the Additional Exclusions tab, and check the item to exclude library items not being used. Don't modify the library files.

Greg McKaskle

[Stuart]

ahh ahh thanks for the no popups . . Ive been Deploy All from right clicking on the cRio.

yeah I checked the exclude unused library files. no real change in build time

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Stuart

B) from Build ,to Deploy all ,to a robot reset, it takes 5:45( yes we timed it) . . can I make this smaller . . like down below the 2:00 mark.

I too would love to make the Build process run faster. It takes between ten and fifteen minutes to build our code using our several-year-old laptop running Windows XP. Checking the "exclude" box Greg suggests made no noticeable difference. I don't think we're using any of the Analysis VIs anyway.

I have no idea how long a Build takes on our new Windows Vista laptop -- it fails to build, giving an Error 8 (possible file permission error), and I haven't finished troubleshooting it.

[EricVanWyk]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

I too would love to make the Build process run faster. It takes between ten and fifteen minutes to build our code using our several-year-old laptop running Windows XP.

Wow. Mine takes up to two minutes on either of my machines (now that I've changed my build spec). Neither of my boxes are particularly impressive - one is 5 years old.

[Mark McLeod]

I have the same problem with the team T-30 laptop taking 10 minutes to build and download. I haven't had time to look into the resources that must be maxing out.

I switched to my newer work machine and it goes much faster, but that's problematical, since I'm really the only one who can use it.

Time to look for a grant for a new team laptop.

[Luke Pike]

My wait is about 5 minutes for the whole process. I usually right-click the build spec and click build, and after that, run as start up. I'm not sure if this is the normal procedure, but it works for me.

[Uberbots]

I dont understand why the whole compiling and downloading process takes so much longer than it has in previous years. granted, the programs are much more complex, but shouldn't most of the libraries be cached on the RIO anyway?

when we go to download test code (running from the main vi, not deploying), the rio spends like a minute downloading all of the supporting vi's, and then downloads all of the project files- even if all we did between tests was change a wire!

the way labview works is really weird in my opinion... yet its so powerful...

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

I have no idea how long a Build takes on our new Windows Vista laptop -- it fails to build, giving an Error 8 (possible file permission error), and I haven't finished troubleshooting it.

I resolved the Error 8. I had copied a project from our Windows XP laptop to the Vista laptop. and the output file directory in the project's build specification wasn't compatible with Vista's filesystem structure.

Now it only takes nine minutes -- a noticeable speedup, but still unreasonably slow. It shows the "Initializing build. This could take several minutes..." message for more than Eric's two minutes, and a totally new Basic Robot project runs the build for another two minutes. This is on a 2 GHz AMD Turion 64 with 3 Gigabytes of 800MHz SDRAM. What the heck is going on here?

[Greg McKaskle]

I wasn't able to look into this today, day jog kept getting in the way. I hope to gain some insight, and hopefully a solution tomorrow. I currently can't explain or justify the time it takes. I looked into the one issue with the analysis libs and the checkbox and can pretty much explain that one. I'll certainly post as soon as I understand it.

Greg McKaskle

[Alan Anderson]

I turned off the virus scanner on our nice new Vista machine, and build time for our full project dropped drastically to just over three minutes. Mystery solved, I guess.

I checked the old XP laptop with 10-15 minute builds, and it only has 256 MB of RAM. Might that explain the extreme slowness?

[Greg McKaskle]

That is helpful in more ways than one. The virus checker is concerned anytime disk activity is taking place, so this also points in the direction of overly disk bound activity.

The LV build used to be so simple. LV VIs are already compiled and the .o is bound inside of them. The files were aggregated into a primitive zip called an LLB, that was attached as data to the end of a tiny EXE wrapper that knew how to load the LV runtime engine, and we were off to the races. If you wanted it smaller, the other parts of the VI were stripped of diagram and some panel info.

With libaries, lots of things changed while I wasn't looking, so let me investigate. I'd like it to take less than a minute. I don't see why the build should be slower than the download.

By the way, noticed in my other post that I had a typo

day jog kept getting in the way

Hah, day job is what was getting in the way, I haven't jogged in years.

Greg McKaskle

[Uberbots]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

The LV build used to be so simple. LV VIs are already compiled and the .o is bound inside of them. The files were aggregated into a primitive zip called an LLB, that was attached as data to the end of a tiny EXE wrapper that knew how to load the LV runtime engine, and we were off to the races. If you wanted it smaller, the other parts of the VI were stripped of diagram and some panel info.

but im guessing the code compiled in these .o and exe wrapper segments are for an x86 processor, not for the processor contained in the rio? is this why it takes so long?

[Stuart]

no I would expect that these .o files are for the power PC( its a power PC right?), although I do reserve the right to be wrong. Im curious to see if any one still has update 1 or update 2 on their computers, see if the change in the libs too place during that time.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

I too would love to make the Build process run faster. It takes between ten and fifteen minutes to build our code using our several-year-old laptop running Windows XP. Checking the "exclude" box Greg suggests made no noticeable difference. I don't think we're using any of the Analysis VIs anyway.

I have no idea how long a Build takes on our new Windows Vista laptop -- it fails to build, giving an Error 8 (possible file permission error), and I haven't finished troubleshooting it.

Alan, something is very very wrong. My laptop (purchased off ebay for $150) is a 1.6 celeron with 1 gig of ram. It takes 2-3 minutes to deploy to the crio.

Just for clarification, that is a Robot Main -> Run arrow deploy. Not a complete build and download so that it runs on startup. We've only done that once this season