Multiple instances of nilm.exe zombies causing laptop to crash

[jwillis172]

Symptom:

My laptop was recently disabled by multiple instances of nilm.exe.

The computer became sluggish and eventually could only be shutdown by removing the battery.

The task manager reported that the amount of memory being using was over 1 Gig and growing. Task manager processes showed pages of nilm.exe, presumably zombies.

And of course the critial error pop-up - "nilm.exe could not initialize." that was always in top and could not be cleared.

Extreme measure taken:

Because of the sluggish performance I could not get to the service menu to shutdown the parent NI service. Instead I renamed the file nilm.exe to killnilm.exe thus inhibiting spawning yet another copy of nilm.exe.

At this point I re-booted and set the parent NI license management service to start manually.

Complaint:

The NI knowledge base lists this as a known problem and that only one copy of nilm.exe should be running. The knowledge base also states the root cause is that TCP/IP is incorrectly configured. I do not agree this root cause statement. The root cause is poor programming practice that allows the lack of a computer resource (TCP/IP sockets connection) to completely crash a computer.

[Philip_Courtois]

Hi jwillis172,

I guess that you are referring to the following KnowledgeBase:

Multiple NILM Processes after Installing LabVIEW and the NI License Manager

Did the solution/workaround in the KB resolve your issue? If not, please let me know.

I'm not a developer, but I see your point in the statement that a missing computer resource should not result in a crash. Please make sure to submit your feedback to the KB through the option on the bottom of the page. This will bring your feedback to the responsible person for the KB.

Thanks!