CVI crash after (implausible) memory warning

[Wolfgang]

Hello,

when switching between two (large) projects, playing with the menu Options / Color Settings and pressing the Help button I received the following message:

After pressing the OK button CVI was gone, i.e. crashed with changes lost...

It happened twice but so far I couldn't narrow it down to an exact sequence. All I can say is that available memory should not be a problem:

[Wolfgang]

Hello NI,

I admit that my description so far is not too helpful - all I can say is that calling Help (via F1 or a Help button) caused five crashes of CVI within two weeks, on two different computers, both Win 7 64 bit, CVI2017 and more than sufficient memory.

There is some still unknown prerequisite for causing F1 to crash, it requires some previous work (source code editing, compilation, changing projects...?)

Any suggestions from your side for helping localize this bug would be welcome, thanks!

[WireWeaver]

How much memory is being used by the cvi.exe process? A 32-bit process has a 2GB limit, even on 64-bit Windows. Depending on how large these projects are, you may be hitting that limit.

You can usually use Editbin /LARGEADDRESSAWARE to trick this into a 4GB limit.

[Wolfgang]

Thank you,

I will have a look at this number and report back. Actually I was hoping for some recipe to obtain a crash log you could investigate further .

Anyway, it is not really clear to me why there can be a popup panel warning me (at this time everything is still fine, i.e. CVI is still there), and only after clicking the OK button CVI will crash...  but at this time CVI should know about the potential problem and avoid it (e.g. by not calling the help...).

[Wolfgang]

Hi Trent,

for the larger of the two projects the cvi.exe process uses about 1.3 GB (I can watch memory consumption increasing as browse information is being built), so its memory consumption is still far from the 2 GB limit. But when using the help after full browse information has been built I experience the crash of CVI...

Any other suggestions?

By the way, the help on version could be updated to version 2017, see image below

[Wolfgang]

...and I can add, the crash does depend on this memory consumption - up to about 1.25 GB help works, if more memory is allocated to cvi.exe the help causes cvi to crash.

[WireWeaver]

How are you checking the memory? If you use performance monitor and add a process counter for CVI, how close does it get to 2GB?

It sounds like you're running into what's described here, except CVI is shutting down because it can't allocate enough memory to complete the operation. Enabling LAA would also help confirm this if it works in the LAA case. 

Trent

[Wolfgang]

Thanks

The values for memory consumption are from the Processes tab of Windows Task Manager. I will also try your /LAA switch suggestion and tell about.

[Wolfgang]

Hi Trent,

according to what I found out with Google Editbin comes with Microsoft Visual Studio - without VS no editbin, right?

[WireWeaver]

I was able to get it with just the build tools for VS. I also want to make it clear that i'm suggesting the editbin hack for investigative reasons and not necessarily as a real fix to your problem... I'd like to know if this error condition is valid.