system slows down during development

[Erwin Sommerauer]

I currently need to reboot my PC twice a day when I do development using LabWindows/CVI 6.0. The PC becomes slower and slower (reaction, screen refresh...). I use WinXPpro german; the same behaviour is on my collegues PC (Win2k pro german). There is no significant increase of processor load, no increase of memory usage. I reinstalled my PC - same... Any ideas?

E. Sommerauer

[Chris Matthews]

I'm pretty sure this couldn't have anything to do with CVI. How much memory do you have? It could be that your machine is moving into virtual memory after executing for a while which uses the hard drive and is much slower. Also, have you defragmented your hard drive lately?

Best Regards,

Chris Matthews
National Instruments

[Erwin Sommerauer]

Memory: 256 MB, drive defragmented. I'll check the virtual memory, but the task manager displays an overall memory usage (the graph display) of about 180 - 200 MB.
It happens mostly when I start my application from within the IDE often during development - simply editing does not seem to be a problem.
I'll keep you informed on the virtual memory issue. Thanks.

[bthorp]

I have had this exact problem before. I checked all of my memory allocation/deallocation and found that I had a small memory leak. By the end of the day, my PC was useless and I had to restart Windows. Check ALL of your memory allocation and make sure that it is being freed. Even the smallest leak can shut down a PC.

[Chris Matthews]

Bthorp is right, memory leaks could be the cause of this. There is a function called CVIDynamicMemoryInfo in the utility library that can help you track down a leak. It will show you all of the dynamically allocated (malloc, calloc, etc) buffers that are existing in your program.

Best Regards,

Chris Matthews
National Instruments