User Interface doesn't update output with position data - c++

Question

I am creating a user interface using (Qt) and I am attaching it to my C/C++ motion application using shared memory as my form of Inter Process Communication.
I currently have a class which I created in my motion application that has many members. Most of these members are used to update data on the UI and some of them get updated about 20 to 50 times a second, so it is pretty fast (the reason being because it is tracking motion). My problem is that the data is not getting updated on the UI frequently. It gets updated every few seconds. I was able to get it work using other variables made in structures from my application by using "volatile" however it does not seem to be working for members of my class. I know that the problem is not on the UI (Qt) side, because I saw that the actual member data was not being updated in my application, even though I have commands every cycle to update the data.
I was pretty sure the problem is that some optimization is occurring since I do not have my members declared as volatile as in my structures, but when I made them volatile it still did not work. I found that when I through a comment to print out in the function that updates my motion data within my motion application, the UI updates much more frequently as if the command to print out the comment deters the compiler form optimizing out some stuff.
Has anyone experienced this problem or have a possible solution?
Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead of time!
EDIT:
The interface does not freeze completely. I just updates every few seconds instead of continuously as I intended for it to do. Using various tests I know that the problem is not on the GUI or shared memory side. The problem lies strictly on the motion application side. The function that I am calling is below: int
`motionUpdate(MOTION_STAT * stat)
{
positionUpdate(&stat->traj);
}
`
where
positionUpdate(){stat->Position = motStatus.pos_fb;}
Position is a class member that contains x, y, and z. The function does not seem to update the position values unless I put a printed out comment before positionUpdate(). I don't track the change in shared memory to update the UI, but instead just update the UI every cycle.

Answer 1

Especially Given you are using Qt, I would strongly advise not using "native" shared memory, but to use signals instead. Concurrency using message-passing (signals/slots is one such way) is much, much easier to reason about and debug than trying to share memory.
I would expect your problem with updating is that the UI isn't being called enough of the time, so there is a backlog of updating to do.
Try putting in some code that throws away updates if they happen less than 0.3 seconds apart and see if that helps. You may wish to tune that number but start at the larger end.
Secondly, make sure there aren't any "notspots" in your app, in which the GUI thread is not being given the chance to run. If there are, consider putting code into another thread or, alternatively, calling processEvents() within that part of the code.
If the above really isn't what's happening, I would suggest adding more info about the architecture of your program.