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VBAI: 32 or 64 bit Windows 7, More than 4 GB?

I am designing a machine vision system with 16 GigE cameras that will be running on a dedicated PC.

 

About 50 megabyes of images will be processed in each 4-second machine cycle, although all of the inspections will happen at approximately the same moment.  None of the cameras will be running continuously or at high frame rates.


It is my understanding that VBAI is a 32 bit application and therefore cannot used more than 2GB of memory.  I have also noticed that the VBAI process for a smaller vision system with only 3 cameras used less than 500 MB of memory (Windows Task Manager - Private Working Set).

 

Which would be preferred?  A 32 or a 64 bit version of Windows 7?  I understand that VBAI originally only ran under 32 bit Windows 7.


Also, would there be a real benifit to more than 4 GB of main memory, such as for the high-performance network adapter?

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Absolutely go for the 64-bit OS. Even though VBAI is a 32-bit process, it is compiled as Large-Memory aware than thus can access significantly more than the 2GB it can under a 32-bit OS (somewhere between 3-4). Also, it lets the system as a whole use more memory and not have to page as much even with lots of other processes. Each VBAI instance could have it's own 3+GB of memory.

Eric
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I also received this reply:

 

Hi Nelson,

 

It sounds like you are setting things up correctly - I spoke with one of my colleagues about this and we agreed that GigE is the right way to go for your purposes. VBAI is indeed a 32 bit application, but with a 64-bit operating system it will have access to up to 4GB of memory.  For this reason I recommend Windows 64-bit, if it doesn't make a difference otherwise.  I don't think you will need that much memory since you're only collecting 50MB of images at a time, but it doesn't hurt to have the extra bandwidth available if necessary in the future.  The only way I could see this becoming an issue is if you need to run these cameras continuously in the future.

 

As for having more than 4GB of main memory, as you said, VBAI won't use too much of it, so I don't think there's an issue there.  I'm not sure about the high-performance network adaptor, but I will say that my experience with GigE adaptors has never yielded large memory draws. It seems like you have thought this through and I think that this setup with 64-bit Windows 7 will serve your purposes well without memory issues.

 

Regards

Julian Rosenberg

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

 

Sounds like 64 bit Windows is the way to go!

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