does hiding indicators reduce thier memory footprint

[Dan_Acres]

We've got something of a resource hog of a program, with Gb of data floating around - we've never really payed any attention to memory usage before but now it's becoming an issue.

I read that extra indicators create copies of the data they display unless the VI is set to subroutine priority. Does the 'hide indicator" do the same job (broken keyboard means no question marks, darn it!)

thanks for the help

[Norbert_B]

Dan,

i created a small example showing that hiding an indicator has effect on memory usage. The example should be selfexplaining, so feel free to take a look.
Nevertheless, UI controls and indicators are not the only pitfall for waste of memory. One additional pitfall regarding controls/indicators is "Make current value default". Esp. with grapch/chart this can significantly increase memoryusage for the VI on the disc and therefore increase loadingtimes....

hope this helps,
Norbert B.

[Dan_Acres]

thanks for the help. Looking at your example it seems as if the data itself is not copied into the indicators. The 'data' in the example was approx 320Mb and the displayed graph was approx 80Mb (labview seems to regard that 80Mb that the graph takes up as being data though on its memory usage thing in VI properties)

Presumably the indicators only hold a copy of the data they display - not the entire dataset, so they don't cost you very much memory unless they're displaying many cells/points

is that correct(questionmark)

[Norbert_B]

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@Dan Acres wrote:

Presumably the indicators only hold a copy of the data they display - not the entire dataset, so they don't cost you very much memory unless they're displaying many cells/points

is that correct(questionmark)

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Yes, that is correct. All indicators create copies of the data they display when the data is passed to its terminal/variable/property node. If you select not to display the control, it will not copy the data. Nevertheless (and therefore you had to close the VI) if you wrote some data to the indicator before, the dataspace is already allocated and setting the option "hide control" will not change the used memory.

The chart is a very special case. If you set the history length to a large value like i did, you will allocate the whole history if you start to write data to the chart. So you will waste lots of memory if you are only interested in few values....

hope this helps,
Norbert