Multicore Computers and reading large-size ASCII in LabVIEW.

[jesboy]

I have a question about Multicore Computers and LabVIEW.

I earlier used LabVIEW 8.2 and had problems reading large-sized ASCII.txt format with labview. The error was "out of memory" on a 1.8 GHz with 2 GB RAM computer.

Now will buy a new computer and again I need to read large-sized ASCII.txt and/or EDF format with and updated version of labview. So my question is: "Will quad-multicore computers (quad 2.0 GHZ with newest processor) outperform   duo-multicore (2.7GHz with a bit older processor) or is it only the amount of RAM I should consider?

Best regards

Jesper Jeppesen

[dan_u]

The CPU (number of cores and clock speed) will not help you with that error.

What would help you most is LabVIEW 64-bit on a 64-bit operating system with sufficient RAM.

When using LabVIEW 32-bit (even on a 64-bit machine) it can't use more than 2GB of RAM. Of course more RAM means that probably LV at least gets 2GB whereas if you only have 2GB in total the largest block available might be the limiting factor.

Anyway, I would suggest trying to read the file in chunks and process them instead of reading the whole file at once. In this case, make sure you reuse the buffers.

[jesboy]

Ok, Thanks a lot!

 so 8 GB RAM should do it with the 64-bit Labview and operating system?

[dan_u · Accepted solution]

Depends on your file size and data types, but I think so.

I know I'm repeating myself, but again, whenever possible I would avoid reading that much data into memory. Code will not be portable to another machine with less RAM.

And if you're using toolkits LabVIEW 64-bit is not an option anyway since most are not supported.

Also, code compiled on LV 64-bit will only run on 64-bit systems.

[jesboy]

Ok thanks a lot! I will need to analyse the large-size data together so dont think splitting it up will be possible. I´m only gonna do the analysing on that computer so it should be alright with the 64-bit Labview.

Thanks again:-)