LabVIEW on SSD ?

[CoastalMaineBird]

LV2013 SP1 (2015 soon!),  Win7,  i7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz

I have a large (1700+ VIs) project.

It's actually four LVPROJ files.

Project 1 produces PPLs, but I rarely change those now.

Project 2 produces "tools" PPLs, about 15 build specs -  I have to work on one of those often right now.

Project 3 produces "addons" which use the tools, about 10 build specs.

Project 4 is the main program with a host Build Spec and a PXI build spec.

Because of dependencies, I have to unload the main to work on the tools, build the tools, unload the tools project, build the addons, unload the addons project, load the host project, and run the host,and PXI pieces.

This process is agonizingly slow.

I'm stuck on LV 32-bit, because LVRT is not available in 64-bit, and I have pieces that have to run on both host and the PXI.

I'm just wondering - what's a good way to find out if this build process is compute-bound or I/O-bound?

I have lots of VIs that do simple things, lending support for the I/O-bound idea.

Loading projects seems to be I/O bound.

1... Is there a better way to handle this stuation?  Maybe projects within projects?  Keep in mind that Project 2 produces PPLs that are needed by Project 3, so if I don't unload #3 before building #2, I get trouble.

2... How do I profile the load project and build processes, to find out what portion is disk activity and what portion is crunching?

3... Has anyone used LabVIEW with SSD (Solid State Drive) ?  Under what circumstances?  How much improvement did you see?

4... Other ideas?  Maybe multiple computers, one for each project?  Maybe multiple VMs, one for each project?

[Sam_Sharp]

I put an SSD into my work laptop (don't tell our IT department!  ), I can honestly say that of all PC hardware improvements over the last 5 or so years, an SSD has the biggest impact on the performance/usability of a PC than any other upgrade.

SSDs offer great read/write (specifically random reads/writes) speeds and, most importantly, super fast seek times (e.g. it doesn't have to wait for the drive arm to move to another part of the disk). Loading the LabVIEW IDE (e.g. loading palettes) and loading projects (all your project files + all dependency VIs - I think LabVIEW does a lot of small file reads which SSDs are good at) really benefits from these. Not only this, but the 10s cold boot times (versus say a minute for a mechanical drive?) means you'll very quickly get a return on your investment.

Having used SSDs for years, I can honestly say that I would not go back to using a PC/laptop with a mechanical drive as it's main hard disk.

For the sake of £130/$200(?) for a 500GB SSD, you can't go wrong!

(Some of the main criticisms of SSDs were the price/storage capacities - these have decreased/increased respectively that they are excellent value for money. The other problem was with failure rates - of course any drive has a chance of failure [you should be backing up anyway] but I think any/most of such problems with early drives are gone now. I've had samsung and crucial drives -  the samsung ones get excellent reviews/writeups)

[Bob_Schor]

About a year ago, I was talking to an NI Support Engineer who said that he'd recently replaced his hard drive with an SSD, and was deliriously (well, maybe not quite) happy with the improvement in speed and responsiveness.  They're becoming quite affordable, as well ...

Bob Schor

[Hooovahh]

Go with it.  When SSD drives were first coming out I had a 64GB drive as my primary development machine.  I had to keep programs to a minimum so it was basically just NI stuff.  I had something like 6 versions of LabVIEW installed (I think 7.1, 8.0, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6, 2009) with various toolkits installed for each.  I had a batch file that would launch all of them simultaneously, and within about 3 seconds all of them were at a new blank VI.  Whenever I was showing off the power of my SSD that was the demo I'd use.  Since then I've always had an SSD (or hybrid drive) for work development.

Today the demo I use is my desktop at home where I can press power (from a real power off situation) and in 10 seconds I have chrome up and open.  This includes bios, login, go to desktop, launch chrome.

It really is the best investment in improving the performance of a computer for the price.

[PhillipBrooks]

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@Sam_Sharp wrote:

I put an SSD into my work laptop (don't tell our IT department!  ), I can honestly say that of all PC hardware improvements over the last 5 or so years, an SSD has the biggest impact on the performance/usability of a PC than any other upgrade.

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Same, don't tell my IT either!

I have the Samsung 850 Pro 256GB, today you can get 512 for the price I bought 256; but I would bite the bullet and buy 1TB and be done with it.