How to configure Teststand to be lite?

[Pandiarajan]

Hello Everyone,

I am using Teststand for the past 3.5 years. I have used Teststand 3.5/4.0 and 4.1. It is a wonderful software with a lot of feature and stuff.

But most of the time I hear feedback from people that it is heavy/memory intensive or taking more time to run the tests. In a few cases, our customers preferred to do the custom sequence in LabVIEW itself to have better timing and performance.

With the confidence in NI's modular approach I wonder, is there any option to configure teststand to be lite?

Apart from simplifying the process model, is there any option to make Teststand lite by enabling/disabling any feature?

Thanks,

Pandiarajan R

Certified LabVIEW Architect

Message Edited by Pandiarajan on 10-20-2009 12:43 AM

[cs_BOT]

Hi,

Unfortunately there is no software as "TS lite". Since you are an experienced user, you would notice its always a tradeoff between memory usage and performance.

TS uses a lot of resources in order to ensure your tests run smoothly.

You can have a look at the following link : http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/7559

You can select/unselect some options to make your sequence file run faster.

[dowNow]

Hi,

I don't agree with this premise, "that it is heavy/memory intensive or taking more time to run the tests." Passing large data sets back and forth between TestStand and code modules is slow, and of course there are always some CORNER cases. When this happens to me I design work arounds that offload tasks to LabVIEW. NI has been hearing this feedback and improving the product for years. The module adapters are highly optimized. If TestStand was generally slow and a memory hog do you think it would be as successful as it currently is?

imho, unless there is a specific, quantified reason to do a certain product in all LabVIEW, and if you use the best practices in the previous post, you are good with TestStand regular 🙂

cc

[antony.g]

I would agree that Teststand can appear quite slow. A lot of companies I have worked for still use quite old PCs. My Pentium 4 machine (2.7GHz, 1GB RAM) takes seconds to launch Word or Excel, but normally around 30+ seconds just to launch Teststand. Editing a sequence can also be slow, with the whole package feeling sluggish.

Some test departments are full of older Pentium 3 machines which makes matters worse.

Teststand is very powerful, but some people just need to call a sequence of tests and record the results, and possibly a lighter/cheaper version of Teststand could be considered.

My problem with Teststand is the lack of a Linux and Mac version. I was forced to write my own which would work on all three platforms, and of course I wrote it completely in LabVIEW:

http://www.apgconsultancy.co.uk/mte.html

Message Edited by antony.g on 11-05-2009 04:44 AM