It’s Spring! Which means it’s time for clocks to change, eclipses (well, that may have been a one off) and a service pack release from National Instruments.

Although this is normally touted as a bug fix release, if you dig in to the readme though they have snuck in a nice new feature.

The new feature is the Profile Buffer Allocations Window. This gives you a window into the run time performance of the LabVIEW memory manager that is otherwise hard to understand.

Previously we only had a couple of windows into the LabVIEW memory manager in the Tools -> Profile menu.

Show Buffer Allocations was the best way to understand where on the diagram memory could be allocated but it doesn’t tell us too much about what actually happens.

Performance and Memory shows us the run time memory usage on a VI level but no way to track it down to the actual code execution.

But now we can see more of this at run time.

 Step By Step

Launch the tool from a VI through Tools > Profile > Profile Buffer Allocations. Below you can see an example run of the Continuous Measurement and Logging sample project.

1. Profiling Control — To confuse things slightly, the workflow begins at the bottom! Set the minimum threshold you want to capture (default is 20 kB) and press Start. Press Stop once your satisfied you’ve captured the data your interested in.
2. Buffer Filters — The bar at the top controls the display of the buffers in the table allowing you to filter by Application Instance, restrict the number of buffers in the table and adjust the units.
3. Buffer Table — The buffer table displays the buffers that were allocated during the run as well as their vital stats. You can double-click a buffer to be taken to it’s location on the diagram.
4. Time vs Memory Graph — Once of the coolest features! Selecting a buffer in the table will display a time graph of the size of that buffer during the run. I can imagine this would be great in understanding what is causing dynamic buffer allocations by seeing the size and frequency of changes.

I think anything that gives us more of a view into some of the more closed elements of LabVIEW has got to be beneficial, so go and try it and learn something new about your code.