PC locking up when running programs created in Labview 6i

[kaiserft]

When running programs created in Labview 6i, the entire PC will lock up. The screen goes black and there is no response from the keyboard or mouse, although the power is on and the hard drive light may be on. The PC is a Pentium 3, about 500MHz running Windows 98. There is a graphics capture program, Hijaak v5, that is a TSR. We are testing the Labview programs without Hijaak running now. The problem occurrs intermittently and inconsistently. After the program has been running an extended period of time, the lock up occurs. The faqs and other documenation did not seem to have any mention of this issue. Besides the possible conflict with Hijaak, what are other possible causes of this problem? The PC does
not experience lockups when Labview is not run.
Submitted via email, phone, and through developer forums.

[Enrique]

kaiserft;

It sounds like a memory leak. Could you describe what your LabVIEW program does? Do your call DLLs or did you created some CINs? Are you creating or manipulating huge arrays? Images?

Enrique

[kaiserft]

There is no error viewable, as the entire PC locks up. The program was created with the graphical programming tools within labview. As I am not familiar with these tools (I am the network administrator, a testing engineer is the guy who wrote the programs) I am not sure that they are calling dll's or what CIN's are. No huge arrays or images are being manipulated or created. Thank you for your suggestions.

[Enrique]

kaiserft wrote:

"We are testing the Labview programs without Hijaak running now."

...

If the test demonstrate that the problem is indeed with LabVIEW, I suggest you should contact the testing engineer that develop it because the program need debugging.

If, on the other hand, the test demonstrate conflict between LabVIEW and Hijaak software, I'll recommend to request support to National Instruments to inform this at www.ni.com/ask. I am sure they will help you.

I suspected a (major) memory leak because the symtoms are similar. As you may already know, when the machine is rapidly becoming critically low in resources, is very little what you can do other than to reboot it. Under this circumstances is hard to trap the error, but you can s
ee it coming with tools for resource management. There is a company called LIUtilities (http://www.liutilities.com) that have a tool called WinTask that enables you to do resource management.

Regards;
Enrique

[Henrik Skupin]

"kaiserft" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:506500000008000000EE3D0000-1012609683000@exchange.ni.com...
> When running programs created in Labview 6i, the entire PC will lock
> up. The screen goes black and there is no response from the keyboard
> or mouse, although the power is on and the hard drive light may be on.
> The PC is a Pentium 3, about 500MHz running Windows 98. There is a
> graphics capture program, Hijaak v5, that is a TSR. We are testing
> the Labview programs without Hijaak running now. The problem occurrs
> intermittently and inconsistently. After the program has been running
> an extended period of time, the lock up occurs. The faqs and other
> documenation did not seem to have any mention of this issue. Besides
> the possibl
e conflict with Hijaak, what are other possible causes of
> this problem? The PC does not experience lockups when Labview is not
> run.
> Submitted via email, phone, and through developer forums.

The described problem arises likewise in my new software, which is
programmed under LabVIEW 6.02. The longer the program runs, the more
largely is the probability that it's lock during terminating. Momentarily
these effect already arise when starting. But I load only a few images, in
order to represent these afterwards on the frontpanel. Further my
application uses a connection with an OPC server, whereby I read maximally 7
values in intervals of 200ms. Now I tested this application on different
computers, but everywhere the same effect occurs. I tried to find out,
where the error lies, so far however without success.

Henrik

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> When running programs created in Labview 6i, the entire PC will lock
> up. The screen goes black and there is no response from the keyboard
> or mouse, although the power is on and the hard drive light may be on.
> The PC is a Pentium 3, about 500MHz running Windows 98. There is a
> graphics capture program, Hijaak v5, that is a TSR. We are testing
> the Labview programs without Hijaak running now. The problem occurrs
> intermittently and inconsistently. After the program has been running
> an extended period of time, the lock up occurs. The faqs and other
> documenation did not seem to have any mention of this issue. Besides
> the possible conflict with Hijaak, what are other possible causes of
> this problem? The PC does not experience lockups when
Labview is not
> run.


I don't have a solution for you, but since you seem to be involved in
tracking the problem down, I'd suggest that you determine what type of
I/O the LV program is doing. LabVIEW itself runs as an application.
While Win98 isn't a fully protected OS, it is difficult and unlikely for
an application to lock up the OS. On the otherhand, many LV programs
communicate with drivers to do I/O, or they directly peek/poke or use
InPort/OutPort. This, as you know is a very easy way to crash an OS as
it bypasses all protection the OS places on the process.

LabVIEW is a programming environment and thus anything could be going on
inside what the engineer has built, and that is most likely what needs
to be investigated. Once you have some suspect low level parts, have
the engineer leave them out and determine when the problem goes away.

Greg McKaskle