Labview RTE compared to Development System Speeds

[arielm]

Hello All,

I've been working on some labview software that gets called by Teststand. The target system has a labview license so I originally was not concerned with the RTE, but then after working with another company I found out that they were creating their VI's and then turning them into .NET Interop Assemblies and calling those rather than the VI's straight. When I asked them about it they said they did it because it ran quicker by using the RTE rather than the full development system.

My question is does anyone know if running the VI's through the RTE is actually faster? If so could I just change the Teststand adapter setting to use the RTE and attain the added speed or would changing it into a .NET Interop Assembly be necessary?

DISCLAIMER: I'm a hardware engineer who hated programming but is trying to learn it as fast as I can now that I don't have a software engineer. So I may not be familiar with some concepts/terminology/best practices so patience is appreciated 🙂

[mikeporter · Accepted solution]

All things being equal, an executable will run faster because debugging is (by default) turned off on the code. This will make it faster, plus when debugging is off, there's more the optimizer can do during compilation. Or that's the theory. Personally I have never noticed the difference.

Mike...

[Dennis_Knutson]

I built all of my custom steps into dll's but not for performance reasons. I wonder how your friend was able to measure the small gain.

[crossrulz]

Where I used to work, we used the development system for debug reasons.  I would think the RTE should run slightly faster for reasons already mentioned by Mike.  I've pretty sure you do not need to compile into .NET assemblies.  I would just compile to a DLL  or make sure the VIs are saved without the Seperate From Compiled.

[arielm]

To answer Dennis_Knutson, he didn't actually measure it, he was basing it off of how it felt. Though at the time I pretty much knew nothing of programming and my manager was still promising a software engineer so I had little desire to actually know the intricacies, so he might have just saved me the explanation and gave the short answer.

To crossrulz. So when I right click on "Build Specifications", select new and then whatever option, is that considered compiling?

Also when you say compile to a DLL are you specifically referring to the option "Shared Library (DLL)" or do you mean compile it into any DLL? I noticed with the .NET assembly it gives out a DLL file yet is handled differently than the "Shared Library (DLL)" option when used in TestStand.

[Dennis_Knutson]

All VIs are compiled. The compilation takes place when you click the tin button of a VI. The correct term should be building a dll, .net. .exe but yes, these are all created with s build specification in the project.