Tip Jar #3 - It's All About Timing

In this entry, I discuss what is often one of the most challenging issues in programming with LabVIEW: Timing.

Speaking from personal experience, problems with timing are among the most common sources of bugs for new LabVIEW programmers. I often hear complaints along the lines of: "I get this weird behavior, but when I run with Execution Highlighting turned on, it always works." Or, "I have to run my VI twice in order to get everything to initialize properly."

These are usually symptoms of timing issues which can be very difficult to debug. Good practices, and carefully watching your dataflow for unintended parallelism are the only real solutions to developing good, trustworthy code.

In this blog entry, I touch on these issues, and also spend time discussing another aspect of timing within LabVIEW: measuring and adding delays within your LabVIEW code, using:
Tick Count (ms)
Wait (ms)
Wait until next ms multiple
The OpenG Enhanced Timing Functions