Faster Startup of Multisim COM API

[GarretF]

This post is part of a series on what's new in Circuit Design Suite 12.0

Multisim has a COM API that you can use to automatically perform simulations on existing designs, as well as other things such as automatically replace components, generate an image, etc. (You can find a full list of functionality in the Multisim help.)

The first thing you do with the COM API is connect to Multisim which launches a headless (that is, it is not visible) instance of Multisim. In previous releases, this was a somewhat time consuming operation, and because this is a synchronous call, your application cannot do anything else until Multisim finishes loading. In this release, Multisim starts up faster - much faster. How much you ask?

Let me qualify this difference before I give the result. Measurements were taken on my computer (with happens to be a quad-core with 8 GB of RAM). They were taken many months before the product was available to you, so things might have changed for the better or worse since then (and I believe it may be even better now). I took 5 measurements each using version 11.0.1 and 12.0 release, discarding the first result (due to Windows caching DLLs), and averaging the remaining 4 times.

Old Multisim (11.0.1): 5050 ms

New Multisim (12.0): 2309 ms

Multisim now starts in less than half the previous time.

Morale of the story. If you're using the Multisim COM API or the LabVIEW Multisim Connectivity Toolkit, you want this release.