Silver Gauge Control Slow

[JMiles]

Hello,

I've built a front panel which has 18 gauge controls.  This may sound excessive, but the VI mimics an instrument panel with physical gauges.  The modern gauge has very poor appearance, very jagged and rough lines on the scale and pointer.

I like the appearance of the silver gauge.  The problem is that with any more than 10 or so silver gauges, the LabVIEW (2012) slows down to a ridiculously slow response.  When editing objects on the front panel, there is a delay of 2 or 3 seconds for every action (mouse clicks, moving objects, etc).  At first I thought it was a problem with a specific computer, but I was able to reproduce the problem on another machine running LabVIEW 2011.

I've seen a few discussions regarding the performance issues associated with silver chart controls and anti-aliasing.  I suspect that the unacceptable performance I am experiencing is due to a similar cause.

Any tips on how to either improve the look of the modern gauge, or improve the performance of the silver gauge?

[Christina_R]

The anti-aliased drawing on the Silver gauge is definitely slower than the Modern gauge, but your performance degradation sounds more severe than I would have expected. Can you provide the VI that demonstrates the behavior?

[JMiles]

This VI has 21 gauges, and there is about a 5 second delay for every click, even using the scrollbars.

This phenomena can be re-created easily by simply dropping several silver gauges on a new VI.

Thanks for looking into this.

[pylb]

I opened the vi and scroll without any problem. I also put a for loop with a 1ms timer setting random value on all the indicators and I do not get any delays or lagging even when scrolling while the vi is running.

What kind of machine are you using (speciffically how much RAM and what kind of graphic card)

[Christina_R]

I also did not see any slowness on my machine (Windows 7 64-bit with 12GB RAM).

JMiles, in addition to the computer hardware info can you let me know what OS you're running?

[JMiles]

Pylb,

Thanks for trying the VI.  I am really surprised that you are not experiencing a similar problem.  My machine is an HP EliteBook 8540p.  It is a i5 2.4GHz, 3GB RAM, NVidia NVS 5100M on-board graphics.

I realize the on-board graphics is not ideal, but I would expect it to keep up to this front panel.  I find that I can update the values to the gauges without delay(moving the needle), but it seems that if the front panel needs to be re-drawn, from scrolling or moving an object, or even selecting an object at design-time, then I experience an approx 5s lag.

[JMiles]

It is running Windows XP SP3 Professional (32-bit) and I am running LabVIEW 2012 Development Suite, which is what our IT dept is currently supporting.

[Christina_R]

Can you try removing (or coloring transparent) the boxes behind the gauges and let me know if that makes a difference?

[JMiles]

I deleted all of the decoration boxes behind the gauges.  This had negligible effect.

[Christina_R]

OK. Can you try coloring the gauges (by which I mean the frame/housing) transparent and let me know if that makes a difference?