What server PC is recommende for Labview server?

[Isaac84]

Hello ,

I am constructing a Labview web server based remote intrumentation system, and i have instaled this server on a generic PC that often suffers from system crashes. I know i can install this server on a better machine that wont fail after several days or month of operation?. I am thinking of a custom PC formed by me with a Dual Core processor, al least 1Gb RAM, enough hard drive space, Intel motherboard and a good power source. Also i am thinking on a Dell Server, or HP machine that would garantee lots of day of good work.

What would you do?

Thanks and best regards

[smercurio_fc]

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What would you do?

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Find out why it's crashing first. Is it crashing due to the LabVIEW app, or from a crappy OS?

[Isaac84]

I think the problem resides in the OS , but i dont know if its because a bad driver installation (Labview doesnt participate on this i think). The thing is i must access my computer remotely often to apply little updates the the Labview program, but it happens that after a few days i am unable to accces it because of this reboots ; when i check the PC , windows tells me that a severe error ocurred, windows crashed because of a bad driver instalation or something like that,  it also says that a blue screen was displayed because of system failure ( The blue screen with memory adreesses is one of the worst system crash that windows can make in my experience) and i must send an error report.

Just for adding more info, the PC i am using was built of several parts of different brands.

[smercurio_fc]

Blue screens are usually indicative of a hardware problem or a bad driver. Have you run a full system diagnostics? You may corrupted installations of drivers. Have you tried wiping the drive and reinstalling the OS? It may be worth it if you can find the problem rather than going down the route a full-blown new computer. However, if the computer is really old, that may be the best course of action.

Also, just because a PC is made up of parts from different vendors doesn't mean anything. After all, even if you get a computer from Dell, it will be made up of parts from different vendors.

[Isaac84]

Ok, your advice sounds good and it is better than run for a new computer, i will format again my hard drive and install all of the drivers correctly, i think that should do. The computer isnt old actually it has a Pentium D processor, but i mentioned about changing the PC because i was uncertain about the problem of my PC.

I will take care of my PC today and if all goes well after that( No more windows fancy blue crashes) i will metion it here. Thanks pal.

[RavensFan]

Blue screens can also becaused by a programming problem and not just a driver problem.

This happened to me.  Someone created some code for me for data acquisition.   After 20 minutes, the PC would crash with a blue screen.  I added some logging and found it was this particular loop that crashed after about 80,000 iterations.  Digging into that loop, I eventually found there was a subVI that was called repeatedly in a loop.  In the subVI they constantly called a create task DAQmx function, read the task, exited the subVI, but they never closed the task.  So it consistently ate up resources as it made a new task every iteration.

Once I found that, I was able to fix that person's code so the task was only created once before the loop, closed after the loop, and only a read was done in a subVI in the loop.

Look at the PC for growing memory over time.  Look for uncontrolled creation of tasks for other things like queues.

[Isaac84]

Ravens, what kind of log did you set up? how can you set up a simple log in labview? I am interested in knowing the exact problem in my case...

Regards

[RavensFan]

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Isaac84 wrote:

Ravens, what kind of log did you set up? how can you set up a simple log in labview? I am interested in knowing the exact problem in my case...

Regards

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I tried to find the file where I did this, but wasn't able to.

I basically opened a text file for writing.  Within the loop I wrote the current time and the iteration loop number.  I closed the file.  I can't remember if I did the opening and closing inside the loop or outside.  Since this can be time consuming, if I did it inside, then I think I would only write out the data on every 10th or 100th iteration of the loop.

Since the blue screen was such a hard crash, there was no way to debug what was going on.  This way I could have whatever data that was last saved right before the crash to look at once I rebooted.  After it did this 3-4 times, I could see that 20 minutes, 80,000 iterations was somewhat of a pattern (it varied somewhat) and I new I was dealing with a consistent problem rather than something random.

You could add more data to your File write depending on what makes sense for your application.  If you want to write out data from multiple locations in your program, you could create a parallel loop to write to file and pass data to it by way of a queue.

Message Edited by Ravens Fan on 05-07-2008 03:57 PM

[Isaac84]

Guess what, i got home by midday and i found the computer shutted down, and it didnt want to turn on again, after a while of having  the power suply disconnected, it turned on again, and guess what , another blue screen error window was shown to me as the cause of the crash, when i accept to send the error to windows they say that the orign of the error is unknown..... Well i will let the computer turned on for a week but with labview program off so i can know were the problems comes from. I think the video card driver has something to do with it...Hey thanks rev for the Log idea, i never though of it and i could use it one day.

Best regards

[smercurio_fc]

Interesting. Sounds like hardware may be a potential problem here as well. Perhaps the computer is overheating. Or perhaps you have a bad power supply. The blue screens will provide several error codes. If it was a driver it may even give you the name of the driver (I've seen this with some audio card driver blue screens). Did you write any of these codes down? You can also check to see if they got recorded in your Event Log.


Message Edited by smercurio_fc on 05-07-2008 04:32 PM