Dear National Insturments
I have created two simple VI's. Both diagrams are completely identical. One of the VI's leaks memory - the other does not. This is LabVIEW PDA in a nutshell. Please help !.
Generally: I am seeing an endless number of crashes and memory leaks on all my PDA applications, its a hazzle to make them run stable. Upgrading from a previous version of LabVIEW - will - as a rule of thumb - produce any number of memory leaks and/or start-crashes - despite the fact that applications build perfectly and that the code is flawless. Code that has been running perfect for years will crash or leak if compiled in a new version of LabVIEW PDA. This has been the trend in all LabVIEW-PDA versions since I started writing PDA-code (LabVIEW 7.1). When coding PDA I use about 5-10% of my time creating the application and then 90-95% of the time debugging trying to locate memory leaks etc.. Very often the solution is to replace indicators or controls with identical new ones or similar "very hard to locate" fixes. Code fixes that are not code-realated are very diffucult to come up with. I only report about 1 of every 20 problems that I encounter, because its usually a very time-consuming process and on top of this a process that is not always rewarded.
For the attached VI's the history of the diagrams are not similar. The leaking VI's started as a large application that I stripped down in order to locate the memory leak. Once I was down to a simple while loop with an indicator and a stop button, I knew that there was nothing more that I could do.
/søren
p.s. Usually I am a happy LabVIEW-bunny, but not today. I have enjoyed coding labview since 1996 and hope to enjoy it for many more years, but the most important thing is to have a stable development environment. New features in new releases should in my opinion yield to stability. LabVIEW 7.1 was the most stable version of LabVIEW I have every worked with ! I am quite sure I am not the only one saying that.
