First of all thanks to Greycat and Michael P for your work on this issue. I know how hard it can be to locate the needle in the haystack, which often leads to not starting a troubbleshooting session with NI. Sorry, this is the truth, many of us hope that the fellow LabVIEW'ers will do all the nasty work and that the next patch from NI will include "help" for the problems we had.
I have experienced the above named memory leak as well, had I only read your postings 2 days ago, I would now have less grey hair and could have taken 2 days of vacation on top of things. I updated to PDA 8.01f1 a week ago, but did not find this patch untill a few hours ago. Is there a "LabVIEW update" around the conor ? It certainly would have been nice for me in this situation.
Enough talk, I have a few more comments to add. I am in the process of "porting" a PDA application from LV7.1 to LV 8.01f1, half a year ago I tried updating to LV8, but kept running into memory leaks that were not at all easy to describe. I contacted NI back then, but eventually the thread went dead (I think because of a the support engineer in Denmark got a new job) and since I had been using a lot of time on the issue and not getting anywhere, I trusted that some other poor LabVIEW soul would eventually do the nasty work for me.
The company I work for are using NP800S touch screens from Ivcdisplays.com, recently this model became obsolete and was replaced with a newer and much faster model (the NP880S). Even though the panel I now have also runs CE 42. as the old one, the labview code displays differently on the GUI. The indicators/controls now display themselves in 3D as oposed to always displaying as system controls/indicators. But I also noted that this seemed to give a memory leak, and converting(replacing) to 2D system indicators/controls seemed to minimize the leak, although I did not document this. I kept getting leaks because I still had tanks and sliders on the GUI, however, the rate of the leak was greatly reduced when I deleted the original tab structure of the GUI and recreated the GUI in an "all new" LabVIEW 8 indicators/controls. This made an improvement as well (again not documented). Just incrementing/decrementing a control would produce memory consumption, needless to say I was not in a good mood.
During this process of replacing old indicators/controls with new ones, the tab structure came out looking rather strange having a horizontal line below the "tab", partically hiding the controls/indicators at the top of each tab page. The workaound to this is adding more tab options to the tab than can be displayed on one line and recompiling. After this excess tab selection options can be removed again and the horizontal line disapears. LabVIEW PDA suffers greatly from many issues such as this one, perhaps its because of its young age - its not 20 yet, but its certainly irritating and although I am still thankfull for the UNDO feature in ver. 5, I would like to have a LV PDA with fewer bugs.
As I was typing this, my computer was - again - recompiling the PDA program I am trying to upgrade and the memory leaks seem to have dissapeared and I am (perhaps) now back to where I was with LV 7.1, namely having a stable program. But it seems to me that LV PDA is much more fragile than "regular" labview, and I have come to suspect that irratic behaviour is not always because of poor LabVIEW code.
Again, thanks for your work on this leak issue, it certainly made my day finding this thread. I will promise to submit my next "unhappy" encounter with PDA so that I can also contribute to this great programming language. LabVIEW rules - and PDA kills PLC's
Soren Jensen, Copenhagen, Denmark
