Actors appear to shut down, but still lock their libraries. Code included.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

You appear to have reasonable evidence of a problem in LV 2013.

Honestly, my memories of the releases bleed together -- I use LV versions during dev and beta when things are broken, and I'm already working in LV 2015 and 16, so I'm a poor person to ask whether or not a given version had any given problem. I don't recall anything like this being reported against 2013 prior to now.

Since you have such evidence, can you report a bug on the main LabVIEW discussion forums and get an AE to try to replicate it with your code? That way we can evaluate whether or not there's an issue with LabVIEW. Posting your code here doesn't help -- I don't have time to delve into customer projects these days, so I have to lean on the AEs a lot more than I did in the early days of AF, and most of the others that I would ask to dig into this are all busy getting ready for NIWeek.

[ThiCop]

Hello AQ,

I currently (since a few days) have a specific Service Request ongoing.
At my personal desktop (LV2013 f2) I could not reproduce the locking behavior.

However on a set-up with LV 2013 SP1 f2 both the customer and a fellow AE could reproduce this locking  behavior at first run (or after at maximum 3 runs).

Most of the Actor VIs (incorrectly?) keep a running state in memory and this then (correctly) locks the library.

I will do some further research on it in the coming days to find out from which  version the issue occurs.
I will also test if I can see this behavior in 2014.

Once I have some more meaningful information I'll give a further update.

Kind Regards,

Thierry

[Oli_Wachno]

In the meantime, I can see this effect also on my computer... at this point of time / in the current project no major nuissance for me, but... any updates on this issue?

[ThiCop]

Hello Oli,

I have not been able up to now to reproduce the issue from scratch on a set-up that I created.
I have only had one of my colleagues that could reproduce it.

This week the customer should again be available for further debugging sessions on his pc.

I will keep you in the loop about any progress that is made.

Once I can reproduce it, I can escalate it internally.
As long as I cannot create a set-up to reproduce it (from scratch), this will be difficult.

Kind Regards,

Thierry

[ThiCop]

Hello everyone,

We have been able to reproduce his issue on a lab pc (finally).
Before I could only reproduce it on one colleague his personal pc and I could not hijack that pc.

We have already been able to do some further troubleshooting on it.

However, we didn't yet find a root cause.

If we don't find it soon locally, then we will start an internal escalation.

SideNote: The customer was able to resolve his issues by reverting to 2012SP1 and running the same (reverted) code.

Regards,

Thierry

[dsavir]

Thanks, Thierry!

Do you know if reverting to LV13 without SP1 would also solve the problem in the meantime? I like LV13

Danielle

[Oli_Wachno]

Thanks a lot, Thierry

[ThiCop]

Hello dsavir,

Reverting to LV13 does not seem to fix the issue.
On a pc where I could reproduce the issue it showed in any version of 2013.

I tested from the original DVD version (August 2013) up to version 2013 SP1f4 on those pc's.

The last weeks I have been in contact (via an internal escalation) with R&D.

They have been able to narrow down the issue to something that is going wrong in the Controller Actor (in this specific case).

The other Actors seem to close down properly.

Once I have some more concrete details that I can share I will update this page.

Thank you for your patience!

[ThiCop]

Hello Oli,

My colleagues from R&D have been able to identify a work-around for this issue in NI LabVIEW 2014.

If the (root) Controller Actor gets launched via the "Launch Root Actor.vi" instead of the "Launch Actor.vi", then the application does correctly shut down.

Can you verify that this also provide a solution at your side?

Note: A Corrective Action Request (492898) has also been created concerning this specific issue.

Kind Regards,

Thierry

[Mike_Le]

I'm running into very similar trouble. I went back and forth with NI Support and we ultimately tracked it down to Launch Actor.vi.

In the original Launch Actor, there's a step where a reference is deliberately leaked for efficiency. I now explicitly close this reference. I also removed the 2-iteration FOR loop that tries to launch the Actor a second time if the first instance fails.

My libraries now unlock correctly every time, though it seems to take longer than before (several seconds after code would otherwise have finished executing).

On a related note, I found this thread where AQ says he filed a CAR to get Close Ref put into Launch Actor. I'm currently using 2013SP1. Is that something that's going into 2014 or 2014SP1?