How to understand VI Time?

[zsbeginner]

Hi,

I'm using LV 8.6, and I'm curious how to understand the "VI Time" statistic under the "Profile Performance and Memory Window".

I am letting one of my VIs "run continuously" for 5 about seconds, but in the profile window, the VI Time comes out to be 1.17 seconds, while the SubVIs Time is 0. As I understand from the Help window, "VI Time" represents the time spent running the code of the VI, so what happens during the other 4 seconds? This is confusing to me because I ran similar tests on other VIs (with no subVIs), and it seems the faster the VI, the smaller the VI Time is.

Thanks a lot.

[Ben · Accepted solution]

The time you see reported is the grand total of all of the time slices of teh CPU used by the code.

If the VI took 1 msec to start up, then did a wait 1 second and then exits, you should expect the total time to be about 1-5 msec alothough the total run time was much more than that.

Ben

[zsbeginner]

Hi Ben,

That makes sense now, thanks a lot. So because I'm using the "run continuously" button to run my VIs for 5 seconds, they have to start up and exit every time. So the slower functions would have less iterations and subsequently a larger VI Time.

Thanks again. 

[Cory_K]

If you are using the 'run continuously' button for your VI, you coded incorrectly.

You could use timing functions to specify how long something should run, instead of pressing abort.