on the fly reporting

[Risotto]

Hi,

I have some question on the use of the "on the fly" option and "'Conserve memory and only display latest result" option. As I undertood from the NI support and from the Teststand documentation, the "on the fly" option allow you to report your results during the execution of your test. This allows also the used RAM to stay constants because after each step the ResultList should be released.

So. This is the theory. In the praxis I observe an increase of my used RAM independently of the option settings I am using. Because I am using tests which are running for several days, the result collection makes the RAM increasing so much that Teststand hang on or is running really really slowly, if it is not crashing.....

I have done some test (please see attached file). By different setting of the options, I run my test why SequencialModel for 1 minute and measure the RAM before and after the execution. (the first time just before I ckick on the "OK" button of the UUT Information dialog, the second time just after I terminate by hand the execution of the test). Between each test, I restart Teststand. I measure the used RAM with the Task Manager of Windows.

My PC is a Win XP SP2 and I am using Teststand 4.1.1 (but the problem exists still Teststand 3.5...)

Test 1:

option "on the fly reporting" NOT selected

option "Conserve memory and only display latest results" NOT selected

Report type is ASCII and all results should be reported

Task manager:

Used RAM at the beginning: 651 MB

Used RAM after one minut: 716 MB (+65MB!!!!)

#Results: 31420

==> +2,12MB/result

Test 2:

option "on the fly reporting" selected

option "Conserve memory and only display latest results" NOT selected

Report type is ASCII and all results should be reported

Used RAM at the beginning: 646 MB

Used RAM after one minut: 681 MB (+35MB!!!!)

#Results: 4969

==> +7,21MB/result

Test 3:

option "on the fly reporting" selected

option "Conserve memory and only display latest results" selected

Report type is ASCII and all results should be reported

Used RAM at the beginning: 662MB

Used RAM after one minut: 681 MB (+19MB!!!!)

#Results: 4969

==> +3,24MB/result 

Conclusion:

By selected the "on the fly report" with or without the "Conserve memory and only display latest results" option, the used RAM by each result is bigger than if you not select the "on the fly report" option. So surely Teststand is generating the report during the execution but more important independant on the option settings the RAM is ALWAYS increasing.

So is it a bug or is it a feature?

Does anybody have experience with the "on the fly report"?

Bye,

Risotto

[Norbert_B]

Risotto,

on the fly reporting (OTFR) saves the results to the file in certain timeframes. If you do not select "Conserve Memory", the ResultList is not reduced when OTFR saves the updated report. Therefore, the RAM usage will certainly increase over time and faster than it does when using "normal reporting". (You can find a general white paper about reporting here).

When selecting "Conserve Memory", the ResultList should stay rather "low", nevertheless it could contain the results of many steps. Therefore, generating the report during the execution increases the memory in addition to the normal resulthandling. After OTFR saves the updated report, some of the memory should be "freed" (this will not reduce the memory usage of the application!).

So i'd expect that OTFR with "Conserve Memory" would increase in memory over the a certain amount of time, but staying on that level afterwards. The slop of this increasing would be steeper than using "normal reporting".

Longer execution times should lead to out of memory errors when using "normal reporting" or OTFR without memory conservation. OTFR with "Conserve memory" should not lead to this error if the system has enough memory and no outsized data has to be handled.

OTFR will always slow down the execution.

hope this helps,

Norbert 

[Norbert_B]

Risotto,

one thing i missed in my previous post which is documented in the help:

Conserve Memory and Only Display Latest Results—When enabled, TestStand periodically purges results maintained in memory while generating on-the-fly reports. If enabled, the displayed report only contains results that have not been previously purged. The purged results are appended to the report file saved to disk. Typically, you use this option if executions run for a long period and you want to limit the size of the report in memory. The option is enabled only when you enable On-The-Fly Reporting and when the Report Format is not XML Document or ATML Report. When you enable this option, you must also enable Discard Results or Disable Results When Not Required by Model in the Model Options dialog box.  

Please check if you have done that.

hope this helps,

Norbert 

[Risotto · Accepted solution]

Hi Norbert,

Thank you, thank you and thank you again!!!! It was the solution!

If you set "On the fly report" + "Conserve Memory and Only Display Latest Results" on AND enable "Discard Results or Disable Results When Not Required by Model" then the behavior of the used RAM is as you explain: it begins to increase but after a while stay constant.

So with it I have a solution, great!

Only the remarks to the NI Support in general that this options seems to be implemented in Teststand since several years (Teststand 2.0 may be???) and that I spent already WEEKS on looking for a solution to this memory problem. OK, I may have been really long to understand how to do it, but from the other side I spend so much time reading the documentation, speaking with the NI support and the NI support spend so much time sending me examples and documentation. I think that for such a question like how to handle reporting and memory by test which are lasting several days, the support should have been able to give me an answer and it must be clear in the documentation how to do the setting.

Anyway, I am happy you could have help me. Thank you again!

Risotto

[sierra47]

Could you explain exactly where you find these settings in order to select or deselect them?

[Oli_Wachno]

This thread referes to an old TS version, reproting has been modified in the meantime.

Can you describe, what you are tryng to achieve?