A while back when we were discussing opportunities for code modularization, I made the comment that it is even possible to incorporate processes into a new application that have already been compiled into standalone executables. At the time we didn’t have the time to go into detail on the point, but now we will take the time to consider the various tasks required to manage an existing standalone executable that you wish to leverage for a new application.

So What’s to Manage?

When I talk about managing an executable, I’m including all those tasks needed to control the executable from an operating system level. Therefore, to complete these tasks successfully we need a certain basic understanding of Windows and how it interacts with the programs that it is running. As you might imagine, most of these tasks will involve simply starting and stopping programs, but there are nuances that are important too. For example, when I double-click on a program the first time, Windows will launch it, but what if I double-click on it again? In this situation Windows has two possible options: launch another instance of the program or activate (bring to the front) the instance that is already running. One of the things that we will look at is how to specify that action for the executables we create,

Likewise, sometimes it isn’t enough to simply launch a program, sometimes we need to take high level look at its operation to determine such things as: How many instances of it are currently running or how much memory it is using. This information can help us decide how to best husband the computer resources that our application as a whole uses. Consequently, we will spend a little time considering the alternatives.

Finally, there can even be subtleties when it comes to stopping an executable. Can we simply signal the executable that it needs to stop, or do we need to force it to stop Now.

Getting Things Started

The first thing we want to cover is how to programmatically launch standalone applications. So to state the obvious, this topic is first and foremost about how to tell the operating system to launch the application for us. Luckily, this task is easily handled by the built-in System Exec.vi. This function allows you to do from within LabVIEW anything you would do from a command prompt — though at times the operations aren’t done in the exact the same way. In fact, for some older versions of Windows the differences can be significant. But even in Windows 8 there can be small inconsistencies. For example, say you have a program called Small Test Executable.exe that can accept a couple of command-line arguments like p3365 fpd2. You could launch this program from the command line like so:

C:\"Program Files\Test Executable\Small Test Executable.exe" -- p3365 fpd2

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with System Exec.vi, which simply returns an (undocumented) error. To get the command to work you have to either write it to a temporary batch file and then execute the batch file, or modify the command like this:

"C:\Program Files\Test Executable\Small Test Executable.exe" -- p3365 fpd2

Don’t see a difference? Check out the location of the first double quote… To simplify dealing with these variations, I have created a subVI to encapsulate the functionality called Launch Executable w-Command Line Parameters.vi and included it in the new release of the toolbox.

The other thing about getting an executable running is that there are a few important launch parameters that we can only set in the application INI file, so we’ll deal with those next.

A Windows Convention

One of the conventions that Windows imposes is that the INI for an executable will have the name as the executable (but with the file extension ini) and the standard configuration parameters will reside is a section with the same name as the file (but minus the file extension). It is in this section that the runtime engine expects to find the parameters that it needs to successfully launch the executable.

The first such parameter we need to discuss controls the behavior when the executable is called more than once. By default, when you create an executable with LabVIEW only one copy of it will launch. If you call it again, Windows will simple bring to the front the one instance of the program that is already running. However, you can change this behavior by including this line in the INI file:

AllowMultipleInstances = TRUE

With this parameter set as shown, Windows will launch another instance of the program each time it is called. An important point to remember, however, is that no matter how many instances you launch, they all share the same INI file. Consequently, if you want to pass unique parameters to each instance, you will have to do so through the command line when the instances are launched.

The second INI file parameter I want to mention controls the program’s visibility to the computer user. Regardless of whether its GUI is visible, when a program normally launches it has a tab that appears on the taskbar. But what if you are creating a program that is intended to run unseen in the background? This setting handles that case.

HideRootWindow = True

When this setting is true, the program can still have a user interface but there is no tab associated with its window on the taskbar. As a side effect, the program also doesn’t appear in the task manager as an “App”, but rather lists it as a “Background Process”. Please note that this terminology is what Windows 8.x uses, older versions make the same distinction but use the word “Programs” and “Processes” to describe it.

The third INI file setting to discuss, is really not so much of a setting, as it is a family of settings that work together to control the program’s ability to respond to external connections via TCP/IP and VI Server.

server.tcp.enabled=True
server.tcp.port=3363
server.tcp.serviceName=""
server.tcp.acl="290000000A000000010000001D00000003000000010000002A10000000030000000000010000000000"
server.vi.access="+*"
server.vi.callsEnabled=True
server.app.propertiesEnabled=True
server.vi.propertiesEnabled=True
server.control.propertiesEnabled=True

Some of these settings are easy to understand, while others are rather obtuse. For right now, don’t worry about what these settings all mean. Next week we will.look at these parameters in detail.

Passing Parameters

To reiterate a point I made earlier, creating a standalone executable that will support multiple instances pretty much necessitates the use of command line arguments. In some ways, this situation is analogous to the situation concerning reentrant clones. The instance needs to be able to identify itself in the midst of a cloud of identical instances.

Given that point, one of the things you should consider when creating such an application is how the program should respond if the required command line parameters are missing. The answer to that question depends, to a large extent, on the nature of the parameters. If the input is essentially a customization for which there is a valid default value, it might be acceptable to simply accept that default and go on. However, in some situations there is no default value possible, so you should consider shutting down the program if the command line parameter is invalid or missing.

Getting Status

After we have gotten the instance (or instances) of a program up and running, one of the things that we might want to do is check on how, and perhaps what, it is doing. For now we will consider this matter in terms of the performance aspects that are visible to Windows. It is certainly possible to access the executable programmatically to obtain internal status information, and even control its operation, but that discussion will have to wait until next week.

General Information

One of the most basic indicators of the health of a program is its memory usage. You should expect the memory that a program has allocated will rise and fall over time. It should not treat trend steadily upwards without regard for what the program is actually doing. If a program’s memory consumption does consistently increase over time, that condition is referred to as a “memory leak” and it is a condition that needs to be addressed. Typically this remediation takes the form of figuring out why the program wants ever-increasing amounts of memory (like programming errors resulting in file or I/O being left open) and fixing the problem. Occasionally however, you will find that the leak is occurring in a place where you have no visibility — like inside LabVIEW itself. In those situations all you can do is try forcing Windows to deallocate the memory or change the way you are doing something so the problem doesn’t arise.

A simple way to read memory usage is to call the simple command line function tasklist and parse the result. Here is the code I wrote to do the job. Its name is Read Task List.vi.

If you leave the Image Name control empty, the call returns information on all the tasks currently running. However, if you populate that control with the name of a program, it returns a list of all the programs with that name. For example, on my computer right now LabVIEW.exe returns 1 item, while chrome.exe returns 13. (Why does Chrome need 13 instances of itself running in the background?)

The two most valuable pieces of information that you can get from this command is the application’s memory usage (expressed in kilobytes) and its PID. The PID is a numeric tag that uniquely identifies each program that is currently running. It is important because other commands or system calls will often require the PID of the program that you are wanting to check.

Digging for the Details

Beyond this basic information there is a variety of other details that you can find, For example, here you can find a community-developed VI that makes direct calls to a .NET assembly in order to return a plethora of information about your computer in general, and the programs that are running in particular. From the standpoint of accessing this information programmatically, this VI has two big problems:

1. The code is at least 7 years old: This is a problem because there are places where the same operations could be done much more efficiently using techniques that LabVIEW has introduced in the intervening time.
2. It’s essentially undocumented: To figure out how to really use it you will have to spend time researching the calls and the specific parameters — which can vary from one version of Windows to the next.
3. It was designed for manual operation: In other words, it was designed to be used interactively, and not programmatically.

Because we need something that is usable from within a program, I created two subVIs that essentially repackage the functionality in a more program-friendly form. The first subVI is called Get Available Instances.vi. To see why this VI is needed, think back to the output of the tasklist function. In that output multiple instances of the same executable (like the 13 copies of chrome) all had the same name. They were distinguished from one another by a numeric id number called a PID. The designers of the .NET interface must have thought this approach confusing because they took a different approach that did away with the PID in favor of a name that was modified to make it unique — as in chrome through chrome#12. Likewise, any file extension was also dropped from the name.

The other subVI (Get Task Performance.vi) accepts as inputs an instance name and an enumeration that lists the available performance parameters that the VI can fetch under Windows 8.

But what is the deal with the loop and all the “extra” logic? This loop is needed because, while some of the parameters are instantaneous values that can be read at any time, others are not. As a case in point, consider the processor usage measurements. Everyone knows (or at least everyone in this business should know) that a CPU can really only do one thing at a time. In fact, the illusion that is central to much of modern technology is the programmatic slight of hand that makes it look like computers are doing multiple things at once.

Now since a CPU can only do one thing at a time, logically there are only two possible immediate answers to the question of how much processor are you’re using. Either you are not executing (in which case you have 0%) or you are executing (resulting in 100% usage). In short, for this type of measurement to have any sort of meaning it has to be approached as a statistic, not an absolute measurement. In the VI, this task is implemented by making two calls to the same measurement counter. The first call — which always returns a 0 — starts the measurement process, with the second and subsequent reads returning the statistical results for the previous measurement period.

Oh, and the logic for stopping the loop after just one iteration? That’s to optimize operation for parameters that are absolute.

Stopping: Fast and Half-Fast

It has been said that, “All good things must come to an end” and this is true for programs as well. However Windows actually provides two different types of shutdown events. The first causes Windows to simply abort the targeted program. This approach, while very fast, is logically equivalent to clicking the abort button on a LabVIEW program — and carries with it all the same dangers. The other type of shutdown event takes longer, but is much safer. It basically sends a message to the targeted program that requests it to stop. However, to reiterate something we learned before, for this messaging to work properly the executable must be written such that the Application Instance Close event will always initiate an orderly shut down.

In addition to using these messages for its own purposes, Windows also provides a command line function that allows users and individual programs to generate these messages as well. I implement both types of shut down requests in the subVI Task Killer.vi.

As a polymorphic VI, the routine incorporates instances that can shut down processes by name and by PID. You simply pick the version that gives you the level of control that you need. For instance, if I wanted to shut down all 13 instances of chrome, using the name version of the code would get the job done all at once. However, if I wanted to stop just a few select instances, I would use the version that uses the PID input. Here is the name version of the code.

But why start and stop at all?

Before ending this time, there’s one more idea that we should consider. To this point we have been thinking about the management of executables in a rather conventional sort of way: Start something just before we use it and close it when we are done. But might not there be situations where the “conventional” doesn’t make sense? I would assert that there are more than you might at first imagine.

The whole point of interacting with a process that is deployed as a separate standalone executable is that it obviously implements some bit of functionality that more than one application would need. Given that fact, starting and stopping it — especially stopping it — can get complicated. Just because one application is stopping and no longer needs it, that doesn’t mean there might not still be another application that does. One obvious solution to this problem is to simply let Windows handle it all. Install the background task such that it starts when either the computer boots, or the user logs in; and then stops when Windows shuts down. This solution might seem wasteful, but what is the real impact of such a solution? Oh sure, the program will be in memory, but if it isn’t being used it will probably be shuffled off to the page file pretty quickly. Likewise, if the executable is written correctly, it will be event driven which means that unless it is accessed by a program that is using it, the process won’t be burning up any CPU cycles either — so what is there to lose?

Just something to be thinking about.

Toolbox Release 8

The Big Tease

Ok, this is all for now. Next time I’ll introduce a little executable that will let us practice some of the theory we have examined today — and expand the conversation to include how to use VI Server to interact with executables created in LabVIEW.

Until Next Time…

Mike…