I think I have a problem that has become unmanageable in my current configuration. Let me give some background.
Originally my application was only going to have to run one instance while sending and receiving data via an USB to I2C connection to 3 different boards. This all works well and is easily done on one PC using just about 20% of the CPU while it is gathering data. Then I get a request to add a bunch of functionality to the program. First was a TCP server that would handle communications with LabView drivers. This add-on did not seem to cause much slowdown when being used and none if no LV drivers were connected. I have a significant amount of things going on in the GUI, such as a graph, table and a few strip charts. Not all of these are being used at the same time, but they are present.
So now I have been tasked to have up to 8 instances of my programming running at one time all on the same computer. This actually works, but it pegs the CPU utilization at 100% while all of these are running which is not so great. I can think of a couple of ways to maybe take the strain away from the CPU, but neither is good since they would likely take a significant time to rewrite the code. One is to have all the GUI controls be on a tab for each instance and run each tab in a separate thread. But only one GUI could be seen at a time, which is not desired. Another is to compile the program as a command line app and get rid of the GUI, but again not that desirable. I suspect there may be other ideas the I have not considered, and would gladly like to hear them. Some type of sharing resources by CVI would be great, if that is possible,
The other thing that these instances need to do is be able to communicate with each other. I had originally wanted to use UDP, but could not get it to work, so I am using named pipes instead. In order for these 8 programs to communicate, I created another app that then created the named pipe and I now have that working pretty good when all 8 instances are running. It is basically a control panel that lets you control all 8 instances at the same time via named pipes and have an abbreviated view of each status of the main executable. Again, this is all working pretty good and is doing what I want, but the CPU is still at 100% since I have not reduced the load on the CPU.
So if you have followed me this far, there is one more twist and where everything kind of falls apart. Now the powers that be want a TCP connection on the other side of this control panel so it can be controlled remotely. It basically replicates the controls on the control panel, and it suffers from many problems that I can't seem to get under control. I think the communications chain is just to long and complicated at this point.
If you followed all that, I am hoping that someone might know how to get the resource problem under control, have a better way of doing the sharing of data using Windows Inter Process Communications, or know of a better architecture model (PS - I don't seem to have a data collection problem), or something I have not even considered.
Please ask questions if you want me to clarify something. Thanks.