CVI processes

[CVI 7.0 User]

After upgrading to 7.1 I've noticed quite a few additional daemon processes running under the task manager regardless of whether CVI or CVI apps are running or not. Some of these processes may also be part of the NI DAQ install. Some of these appear to be connected with NI's LookOut, which I don't recall ever installing.

1. Is there a list of processes that CVI vs. DAQ needs to have running in the background in order to properly function and that tells what each process does (e.g. which are for the development tools and which are for CVI apps)?

2. Why do these processes need to be running all the time? Can they be reconfigured to run only when needed?

3. Which CVI/DAQ processes will be configured to automatically run on a target machine when a customer installs one of my CVI apps? With the plethora of trojans that infest PC's these days, some customers will want to know which are legitimate processes and what they do. Also, you can have strange interactions between various dll's and daemons and it would be good to know this information for T-shooting purposes if a problem should arise in the field.

Thanks,

Pat

[Chris Matthews]

These processes are services and are common for NT and XP based software, especially drivers. The reason for the increase in the use of these service processes is that there has been redesign in our drivers and we added license management into our software. The only one that is directly related to CVI is the License Manager. That is a process that manages National Instruments licenses on your machine. It is not distributed to run-time systems. The other services that are installed on a development machine are mainly related to drivers. NI-PAL (NIPALSM.exe) is the manager for the kernel level communications for all of National Instruments drivers. The NI Service Locator is part of the driver framework that locates and communicates to different NI drivers. There are a couple other services that are related to Datasocket OPC functionality (those are the ones that were originally Lookout features).

All of these services are idle unless manually accessed by a program that uses them so they do not use any CPU time. For a list of the services running on your machine you can look in the Administrative tools of your control panel.

The ones that are used by drivers will be installed on any machine with NI drivers. CVI distributed applications should not install any services unless you are installing DataSocket with your CVI app.

Best Regards,

Chris Matthews
National Instruments