How Much Memory Can LabVIEW 32-bit or 64-bit Allocate?

Updated Jul 21, 2023

Reported In

Software

  • LabVIEW

Operating System

  • Windows

Issue Details

I am developing an application in LabVIEW on a Windows machine that requires large amounts of data to be stored in memory. However, after allocating a certain amount of memory, LabVIEW crashes. Is there a limit on the amount of memory that I can use in LabVIEW?

Solution

The amount of memory LabVIEW can utilize depends on the bitness of LabVIEW and operating system used.
 

LabVIEW (32-bit)
  • On a 64-bit Windows operating system, LabVIEW can access up to 4 GB of virtual memory without modification.
  • On a 32-bit Windows operating system, LabVIEW can access up to 2 GB of virtual memory by default. This can be extended to 3 GB by changing Windows' Boot Configuration Data store.

LabVIEW (64-bit)
  • LabVIEW can use up to 16 TB of virtual memory when using LabVIEW 2009 (64-bit) or later on Windows Vista (64-bit) or later.

Additional Information

  • In versions of LabVIEW previous to 8.5, LabVIEW can only use 2 GB of memory. However as of version 8.5, LabVIEW is large address aware and can assign addresses to more than 2 GB of virtual memory. Virtual memory is the memory available to the process that is running. 
  • On May 1, 2021, NI software dropped support for Microsoft Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit), Windows 8.1 (32- and 64-bit), Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 R2, and all 32-bit Windows operating systems.