Necessary LabVIEW services on Windows

[DailyDose]

Hello.  I know this isn't necessarily a LabVIEW question, but it pertains to running the LabVIEW environment.  As many of us know, when installing LabVIEW, a bevy of services are installed as well thus causing a pretty significant increase in boot up time.  I have looked for any white paper on the subject but have not been able to locate anything.  Does anyone know just what services are absolutely needed?  At one point, I turned off all NI services in my MSCONFIG but this resulted in various issues relating to LabVIEW as well as NIMax and I have tried to add the services on one at a time to see what fixes what.  So again, is there a list already in existence for this subject?  Items like NI Modbus and OPC Server I don't think need to be running at boot up, but then there are like 6 different NI Web Server apps or something like that.  So any help here would be hot.

[Hooovahh]

I too am a bit curious about what ones I can disable, but I think the answer to your question is "It depends".  Because you can disable all the web stuff and OPC stuff all you want, but as soon as you go to use some OPC server or client functions you'll get some weird errors.  You can disable the NI Service Locator and LabVIEW may work, but as soon as you go to use the NI Example Finder you'll see it doesn't work.

So while it is annoying that NI has something like 26 services on my machine, I'm always hesitant about disabling any, because I just don't know what will break as a result, which may seem fine for now.

[DailyDose]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

I too am a bit curious about what ones I can disable, but I think the answer to your question is "It depends".

Yeah, I at one point disabled every service.  I get "NI OPC" error each time I boot my machine up.  But another thing was that NI Max didn't work properly.  There are about 6 services apparently that need to be running for NIMax (and DAQmx for that matter) to operate at its fully potential.  But I find that sort of thing frustrating.  Why can't those services "Turn On" when I open the application thus remain "As used" services.

[DailyDose]

I guess one could configure the majority of services to do a delayed start.  That seems to help some.

[Jacobson-ni]

The documentation is still a bit vauge but I think this white paper is new as of 2016. It at least makes an effort in describing what will break if a specific service is disabled.

https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/supplemental/13/list-of-windows-services-installed-by-ni...

[Bob_Schor]

Very helpful post, Matt.  For what it is worth, on one of my LabVIEW 2016 machines, I have the following services:

Application Web Server

Application Web Server (64-bit), disabled

Authentication Service

Citadel 4 Service

Configuration Manager

Device Loader

Domain Service

License Server, Manual

LXI Discovery Service

mDNS Responder Service

Network Discovery

PSP Service Locator

PXI Resource Manager

Service Locator

System Web Server

Time Synchronization

TSU Clock Service

Variable Engine

DAQmx Remote Config and Development

RIO Server, manual

I've installed Real-Time and Vision, and my devices include PXI, but no RIOs or cDAQs, and no IVI or OPC.  I've had occasion when one of these services "went missing", usually found when I couldn't load LabVIEW Example Code, solved by doing a Repair (usually).

At present, this machine is only doing Development work.  It can "see" some cameras, but I don't think it's seen any other hardware.

Bob Schor

P.S. -- I'm definitely not brave enough to turn any of these services off.  I've had enough troubles when one gets turned off "accidentally".

[altenbach]

Also note that LabVIEW will offer to disable fast startup (see e.g. here) on any windows OS 8 and newer (e.g. Windows 10), which will prevent some boot speed improvements of the newer OS and thus indirectly slow you down. (Not an issue on windows 7)

If you are not planning on using certain hot pluggable hardware, you should leave fast startup enabled. (Note that virtually all NI installers, even updates, will ask to disable fast startup, and the default is to disable, so watch out for that. I can't tell you how many times I unchecked that box :().

[Jacobson-ni]

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@Bob_Schor wrote:

P.S. -- I'm definitely not brave enough to turn any of these services off.  I've had enough troubles when one gets turned off "accidentally".

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Same here, I don't knokw why I would ever need LXI Discovery Service but I'm sure if I turn it off I'll find out three months later after a few hours of troubleshooting.

[Sam_Sharp]

This is another argument for doing LV development in Virtual Machines - you can install all your LV stuff in the VM and not have to worry about it slowing down your machine the rest of the time.

Also, I believe another option is to set all of the services to 'manual' - my understanding is that this will cause them to start up when needed (e.g. when called by another application or service), rather than at boot-time.

[DailyDose]

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@Sam_Sharp wrote:

This is another argument for doing LV development in Virtual Machines - you can install all your LV stuff in the VM and not have to worry about it slowing down your machine the rest of the time.

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I have quite honestly put a lot of thought into using VMs to do dev work.  The computer I inherited from the previous employee has all LabVIEW years installed and can be a bit of a headache making sure you're using the right one with the correct drivers and what not.  The only thing that would worry me about VMs is the headache that is likely invetiable getting hardware to work hand in hand with the VM.  And then of course the decrease in processing speed and RAM.