Labview freezes while editing large VIs

[Basjong53]

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@altenbach wrote:

• I've noticed that new computers are sometimes very sluggish due to a lot of system update happening in the first few days. Also, if you have cloud storage (google drive, OneDrive, etc.) there could be gigabytes if synchronizations going on. This will quiet down. What is your connection speed? How much network traffic is there?
• Check for driver updates. (Windows updates ... additional updates ...optional updates ...driver updates)
• The idea of "antivirus/security software, etc." mentioned earlier is also good. New computes sometimes come with "bloatware", i.e. installed trial software that nobody wants. Most are poor and can be intrusive if they don't understand LabVIEW. The plain security that is built into Windows 10 is typically sufficient.
• What is the CPU (Model, # of cores, etc.).
• What are the power settings? (e.g. it will be slower if optimized for battery life)
• Is this your own computer or managed by IT?
• Of course it could be that the hardware is faulty. You can check the drive for errors. Some computers also have other hardware checks in the BIOS (RAM, etc.).
• Are you using LabVIEW 32bit or 64bit? (should not make a difference unless you need large dataspace).
• If things are fast on other computers, the VIs are probably fine. Check for excessive overlapping objects on the front panel. Also remember that all VIs you load will probably get recompiled on a new system (I assume you use "separate compiled code"), so this will slow down loading the first time. What are your compiler optimization settings? (Menu...options...environment...Compiler).
• ...

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1. I didn't notice any background network activity. I have a 1000 down / 100 up connection.
2. Should be the latest.
3. I've deinstalled all bloatware like McAfee. Only Windows Defender is active.
4. Intel Core i7-10750H: 6 cores, 12 threads. If this isn't powerful enough, then LabVIEW really has a problem.
5. High performance power setting, laptop is connected to power.
6. I manage the PC myself, it has Windows 11 Home installed. Maybe Windows 11 is the problem?
7. I'll do a hardware check later this week.
8. LabVIEW 2020 SP1 32 bit.
9. The compiler optimization level is at 5.

[BertMcMahan]

Is it just this project or is it every project? You can open some examples in the Example Finder to see what's going on.

Also, try doing a Mass Compile on the whole directory.

[altenbach]

If you look at the task manager, what is the CPU frequency? Could it be that the CPU fan is not connected and the system clocks down for protection? Are the cooling gaps possibly still covered by packing tape?

Of course windows 11 has not been really tested with LabVIEW and officially supported. (check here)

(Microsoft initially botched quite a few things that have already been fixed (example)). It is also possible that NI needs to patch a few things for full compatibility. Hard to tell.

[rolfk]

As part of a test for potential problems with existing LabVIEW projects on Windows 11, I installed LabVIEW 2014SP1 (32-bit and 64-bit) on a Windows 11 installation inside a VMWare engine.

Yes it is extreme, unsupported and definitely not a recommended installation, but I was planning on trying out to go quite a bit lower to see if there are serious problems. (I have LabVIEW 6.1, 7.0, and 7.1 in a Windows 10 installation inside VMWare running just to see if it can be done and I have not yet found real problems. Of course since it is VMWare it does not really run real DAQmx and other hardware drivers although they were installed also and do load but I have not done any runtime tests involving hardware drivers such as DAQmx inside VMWare.)

I can load LabVIEW 2014 examples including RT and FPGA projects and also tried a few of our old projects using such functionality. I even could run some FPGA compilations (but usually do so in the NI cloud anyhow) and built some test executables. So far I haven't found real show stoppers (once you get Windows 11 installed, which requires some special VMWare configurations). In fact I find the new Windows 11 interface the most difficult part about this experiment. The new Taskbar is clearly inspired from the MacOSX Dock, but in my opinion less functional and less practical.

Next step is a try out with a more recent LabVIEW version, and some other industrial software including Beckhoff TwinCAT and Siemens TIA Portal, where I do expect some compatibility issues.

I had had computers in the past that at some time acquired the behaviour reported by the OP. I never quite found out what it was and it usually happened towards the time the computer was anyhow up to replacement so I never spend a lot of time investigating into it. It seemed like LabVIEW was calling into system functions in some way that for some reason had suddenly gotten enormous delays. With all the NI-this and NI-that that gets installed on a Windows computer over time, it is quite possible that some of these drivers might suddenly interact in a non-intended way and that LabVIEW on starting up or opening certain things, gets stuck in there.

One other thing I know could cause such delays in older LabVIEW versions were network printers that were not currently accessible. Somewhere, somehow if LabVIEW then tried to open a file dialog or sometimes simply some files, it got stuck in the printer enumeration (which I'm pretty sure it didn't even call itself explicitly) until the network function returned with a timeout. Removing those inaccessible printers (and sometimes network shares) from the Windows Explorer list would then fix it. But I believe those problems were somehow remedied in the LabVIEW 8.x times.

[altenbach]

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@Basjong53 wrote:
I've deinstalled all bloatware like McAfee. Only Windows Defender is active.

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Be aware that McAfee product are sometimes intentionally "barbed" and hard to remove completely, so there might still be processes lurking. Maybe also try the McAfee Consumer Product Removal tool (MCPR)  just to be sure.

(For some very old perspective (2013!) on performance impacts by McAfee, read my comment here 😮 )

[cstorey]

Are you using a laptop and docking station?  I had some issues with this recently.  Even thought the laptop was relatively new, because IT installed a corporate image and did not update all drivers afterwards there where some incompatibilities with ThunderBolt and Intel drivers.

I used Snappy Driver Installer Origin to look for old drivers and install newer ones on my system that might be an issue.  See - https://www.snappy-driver-installer.org/

[Basjong53]

An update: I haven't used the notebook for some time, but the issues remain. Unfortunately, I get the same behaviour now on my Windows 10 workstation. The PC where I haven't had any issues before. It seems to be related to the project that is very big. I loaded my active library into a new empty project and I don't have the freezes. Anything I can do to my project to solve the problem? It is happening to every file that I open/create/edit/close.

[BertMcMahan]

It sounds like something in there is corrupted or has a circular dependency. I'd try removing half the things from the project and seeing if it persists. If so, remove another half; if not, switch back to the second half of the first effort and see if it's in there.

Note that the project file itself is a .xml file, so you can poke around and see a few things. Maybe you could write a short program to search for all file paths in the project and just make sure they exist?