LV 2021 stability issues

[Pumuckl]

Hi,

We upgraded to LV2021 and I am having severe stability issues.

I was just testing the installation, created a little program to read in values from 2 multimeters and I am experiencing random crashes while editing the block diagram or crashes when I try to debug. After 1 hour and more than 5 crashes I gave up...

With previous versions I experienced occasional crashes, maybe once a week, but nothing to this magnitude.

I cannot find much on stability issues here and I wanted to get a feeling if this is common or not. So please leave a short post if you have issues...

Since our IT department runs all kind of invasive stuff in the background and we do not have administrative rights I would forward the issue to them, if it is something common I would report and document the issues here in the forum.

Best regards,

Christian.

[RTSLVU]

---

@Pumuckl wrote:

I was just testing the installation, created a little program to read in values from 2 multimeters and I am experiencing random crashes while editing the block diagram or crashes when I try to debug. After 1 hour and more than 5 crashes I gave up...

With previous versions I experienced occasional crashes, maybe once a week, but nothing to this magnitude.

---

Honestly LabVIEW never crashes, or at least I can't remember the last time LabVEW (IDE or Compiled application) crashed.

I suspect you have hardware failing or is has something to do with this:

---

@Pumuckl wrote:

Since our IT department runs all kind of invasive stuff in the background and we do not have administrative rights

.

---

But again my development computer has a bunch of corporate security policies pushed on it and there are no issues I can pin %100 on that. Except for the fact that I can not run any of the programs I compile to an EXE on my workstation. 

[Kyle97330]

You should be able to have multiple versions of LabVIEW on one PC, as they can share support software up to 3 versions back.

If you set up a PC with LabVIEW 2018 and 2021, or 2020 and 2021, or whatever, then you can do a better comparison to try and see if it's a problem with your setup or with the version of LabVIEW you are using.

The one thing doing that wouldn't check is if the problem is in the support software (NI-MAX, NI-VISA, etc.) since that would have to be the most recent version.

[Pumuckl]

Thanks for the replies, since LabVIEW is the only thing crashing on my PC I am probably not facing hardware issues. I usually run Altium Designer, Fusion, Eclipse and a couple of other things all day long without issues on this machine.

If no one reports stability issues I suspect it is the stuff our IT is running in the background and have them sort the problem out. If they do not want us to take care of our issues ourselves, they have to do it ...

Running different Versions is a good idea, but since I cannot install anything on my machine this is nothing I can get sorted myself.

Anyways, I continue working with LV2017 on my other machine and wait a couple of days to see if people using V21 report issues...

[billko]

---

@Pumuckl wrote:

Thanks for the replies, since LabVIEW is the only thing crashing on my PC I am probably not facing hardware issues. I usually run Altium Designer, Fusion, Eclipse and a couple of other things all day long without issues on this machine.

If no one reports stability issues I suspect it is the stuff our IT is running in the background and have them sort the problem out. If they do not want us to take care of our issues ourselves, they have to do it ...

Running different Versions is a good idea, but since I cannot install anything on my machine this is nothing I can get sorted myself.

Anyways, I continue working with LV2017 on my other machine and wait a couple of days to see if people using V21 report issues...

---

This is the first time I have heard such a complaint.  Much more likely is that the code has inherent race conditions that are exaggerated by the way the new LabVIEW version is compiling your code.

[Pumuckl]

Well,

I am not the best LV programmer, I mainly do simple tools to automate measurements during my developments.

Have a look at the example below. This will run fine, but as soon as I put a probe on one of the wires LV crashes. Even when the program is not running right clicking a wire will crash LV.

[GerdW]

Hi Pumuckl,

replace the TWL by a simple While loop with a wait function inside: do you still get crashes?

Using a TWL on a default Windows computer doesn't make (a lot of) sense, they are intended for RT targets. I also had problems with TWL structures when I copied them in the block diagram (inside the same VI or from one VI to the other)...

[Pumuckl]

Hi Gerd,

I do use these loops because I do anything realtime but because they can retain the phase.

I tried and replaced the loop with a simple while loop, still the same. Even right clicking one of the wires in the example below crashes LV.

[GerdW]

Hi Pumuckl,

when LabVIEW even crashes for such simple VIs you should go into a clash with your IT department, as suggested before...

---

@Pumuckl wrote:

I do use these loops because they can retain the phase.

---

Why do you need that on Windows?

[rolfk]

Definitely use normal loops instead of Timed Loops. They were developed for use on LabVIEW Realtime and heavily debugged there, but had to be ported to Windows in order to let people develop their Realtime diagrams on the host system. They are highly invasive in that they go very deep into Windows to do what they need to do to get a similar functionality as on the real-time controllers. And despite that they can't give the same timing accuracy as on real-time targets.

While they do seem to work for some people without much problems, I never use them on LabVIEW desktop simply because they do not offer any advantage to normal loops and have the potential to conflict with stuff in my Windows setup that I have no control over (my computers are also managed by corporate IT, although they allow us to install software packages ourselves as long as we adhere to certain guidelines including to only install properly licensed software).

If LabVIEW still crashes after that you have some serious problems with your machine. Pretty much the only times I manage to crash LabVIEW is when I work on Call Library Nodes to call my own DLLs/shared libraries. But that is expected and always can be traced to stuff I did wrong in the Call Library Node and/or DLL.