Performance and Reliability of RT

[Munk100]

I have been asked to poll the NI community about the performance and reliability of RT running on a PXI-8106 platform with LV 8.5.1 and RT 8.5.1.  The project is not high-speed, but the system must execute the program with high accuracy and reliability.  I'm an intermediate-level  LabVIEW programmer (at least I like to think so), but a complete newb with RT.   The RT system will be monitoring and controlling a variety of power systems, temperature DAQ and waveform generators.  The hardware we are using is as follows:  

    PXI-8106 Intel Core 2, T7400 @ 2.16 GHz

    PXI-6713

    PXI-2567

    PXI-6225

Any opnions or comments would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

munk (aka Tad) 

[StevenA]

I don't have much experience with that hardware, I use mostly compact rio. But  I can comment on RT in general.  First any RT applications reliability is going to be dependent on the quality of the programming.  I have deployed many RT systems around the world with great success.  If your programming is solid, then the system should be very reliable.  I have run into bugs in my systems, but typically once I have fully tested the system, it's reliability is very good, running for long periods of time with no maintenance.  The second thing you might take into account is the environment that your systems is in.  Are you going to be stressing the hardware beyond it's design specifications?  If so that may reduce the reliability of the hardware.  NI will publish MTBF values for the hardware you are using.