There's a problem I have been noticing very intermittently in LabVIEW. It's been on multiple PCs and multiple editions (2021 32 bit, 2024 32 bit).
What will happen is that I try to open and use Quick Drop. I press control-space, and then start typing. 98% of the time it works as expected, but that last 2% of the time it lets me type in one or two characters, then the whole thing becomes unresponsive for 5-10 seconds (not even any more letters are being entered in the text field), then it resumes and starts working again, with anything I typed during the freeze getting lost. This really throws off my programming flow, so much so that I set up Process Monitor to run, filtered for events coming from LabVIEW.exe, so that I could wait for it to happen and then check what LabVIEW was up to in the meantime.
This afternoon I was finally able to have the issue occur under LabVIEW 2024 while Process monitor was logging, and I had just typed the "t" in "tc" to put down a True constant, and this is a rough summary of what LabVIEW seemed to spend its time doing:
4:27:29.0 to 4:27:29.2: Load a bunch of stuff from "LabVIEW 2024\resource\dialog\QuickDrop" plus some assorted VI files and checking the VI object cache file - this seems expected
4:27:29.3 to 4:27:29.5: Look through all the .mnu files in "LabVIEW 2024\menus\" as well as many "menus" directories under "Program Files\NI\LVAddons\" - makes sense, needs to populate the list in the QD window
4:27:29.6 to 4:27:35.6: Reads of approximately 2000 VI files, the vast majority of which should be completely unrelated to Quickdrop... Approximately 1500 from vi.lib and 500 from the LVaddons folder.
So clearly it's that last section lasting (this time) about 6 seconds. I had configured Process Monitor to log the duration of each access, and when sorting by that to find what took the longest to access, I found that by far the files in "LVaddons" took longer to access.
Average of the ~1500 files in vi.lib: 0.5 ms per file
Average of the ~500 files in LVAddons: 7.8 ms per file
It's a very clear delineation, as well. The LVAddons files were all from 6.9 ms to 22.7 ms, while all the vi.lib files were 0.39 ms to 0.9 ms.
There's other operations in there as well that didn't take much time (assorted registry checks, DLL calls, etc.) but nothing with long durations or in such quantity as to make up a significant portion of the remaining time.
As such, my best guess is that whatever it's doing is something it doesn't do all the time, but when it does do it, it takes far longer on the LVAddons for some reason.
Anyone have any idea why this might be happening and how to stop it? I did find this:
https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA03q000001E9aiCAC&l=en-US
However, that article is about quick drop taking a while to appear. It appears just fine, it's the part after I type in a letter or two that freezes up for a bit.
