Robin Bush (05/14/91)
I have an Improv worksheet containing 3 categories, 50 groups and 10 equations. I find that once the equations are in place, making any subsequent structural changes to the worksheet can take a half hour or longer! Similarly, adding or editing an equation takes forever. I have already set recalculate to manual. Can anyone tell why this is happening, and how I can speed things up? Thanks -- ---------------------------------------------------------- Robin Bush | Tel: 714-725-2243 Dept. of Ecology and | Fax: 714-725-2181 Evolutionary Biology | email: robin@fisher.bio.uci.edu Univ. of California | Irvine, CA 92717 | ----------------------------------------------------------
glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) (05/15/91)
Robin Bush writes > > I have an Improv worksheet containing 3 categories, 50 groups and 10 equations. > I find that once the equations are in place, making any subsequent structural > changes to the worksheet can take a half hour or longer! Pretty polite of you to call it "sluggish" if it takes half an hour. First of all, I have no idea why, but I'm not above speculating :-) Is it possible that you have lots of processes running and you are short on memory and the operating system is just thrashing terribly? Is your disk almost full? Does the disk make a lot of noise during this half hour? Is anybody printing to a printer hooked up to your machine? Um, let's see, what else. Maybe your document just triggers one of those "worst case scenarios" that we applications developers hate so much :-) -- Glenn Reid RightBrain Software glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us NeXT/PostScript developers ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn 415-326-2974 (NeXTfax 326-2977)
gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) (05/16/91)
In article <504@heaven.woodside.ca.us> glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes: > Robin Bush writes > > > > I have an Improv worksheet containing 3 categories, 50 groups and 10 > > equations. I find that once the equations are in place, making any > > subsequent structural changes to the worksheet can take a half hour > > or longer! > > Pretty polite of you to call it "sluggish" if it takes half an hour. > [Glen does some speculating, skipped over here] One thing you (Robin) might want to do is open a terminal window and do a ps -axv to see what processes are using up memory on your machine. With this large worksheet in place, is it just Improv that is sluggish, or are all applications sluggish? - - - - - - - - Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@rpi.edu or gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu ITS Systems Programmer (handles NeXT-type mail) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy NY USA
Robin Bush (05/16/91)
In article <5b+h4pb@rpi.edu> gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) writes: > In article <504@heaven.woodside.ca.us> > glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes: > > Robin Bush writes > > > > > > I have an Improv worksheet containing 3 categories, 50 groups and 10 > > > equations. I find that once the equations are in place, making any > > > subsequent structural changes to the worksheet can take a half hour > > > or longer! > > > > Pretty polite of you to call it "sluggish" if it takes half an hour. > > [Glen does some speculating, skipped over here] > > One thing you (Robin) might want to do is open a terminal window and do a > ps -axv > to see what processes are using up memory on your machine. > > With this large worksheet in place, is it just Improv that is sluggish, or are > all applications sluggish? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to both you and everyone else who has responded to my plea. I have a 040 machine with 32 Meg, little else running besides Improv, nobody printing, everything else runs ok, etc, etc. The NeXt is not chugging, it just sits there quietly while the Improv wheel turns and turns. I called the Improv support line, they said they have been getting lots of calls from people with similar problems (trying to make structural changes to a big data set having lots of structure and equations). They said they were surprised that people were using Improv for so many different things, and that their engineers had only made sure that it worked well for worksheets like those little business ones they show in the documentation!!! They also made what turned out to be a useless suggestion: to save as an .imx file instead of an imp file, the logic being that dumping the formatting might help. Turns out that all you get in an .imx file is a picture of your equations - they don't work. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions. -- ---------------------------------------------------------- Robin Bush | Tel: 714-725-2243 Dept. of Ecology and | Fax: 714-725-2181 Evolutionary Biology | email: robin@fisher.bio.uci.edu Univ. of California | Irvine, CA 92717 | ----------------------------------------------------------