Front-end sluggishness
- To: Mathematica user's group <MathGroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu>
- Subject: Front-end sluggishness
- From: Robby Villegas <Villegas at knox.bitnet>
- Date: Tuesday, February 18, 1992
I have recently encountered a state of Mathematica on the NeXT in which
the front-end becomes intolerably slow. When typing, each _character_ takes a
couple seconds to be displayed, and relocating the cursor can take ten to
fifteen seconds. Summoning a menu takes up to twenty seconds, and saving the
file is delayed by ten to twenty seconds. Even the smallest operations of the
front-end incur a tremendous delay, and during the pauses, the mouse-pointer
becomes the familiar spinning disk.
I will try to list the parts of this session's history that could be
relevant. For one thing, I had been executing and re-executing a large
program because I was making changes and debugging. Two or three times I used
the menu command "Quit/Disconnect Kernel" from the Action menu, Kernels
submenu, and then restarted the Local kernel as the Current kernel using these
menus, so that I could enter the program with a clean slate. The program
generated a lot of Graphics3D objects with PostScript pictures, so when
Mathematica began to use virtual memory, I purged all the PostScript cells
using the Find dialog box. It may be coincidence, but it seemed that after
this the front-end went into sloth mode.
Does anyone know what the cause of this problem is, and how to rescue a
session from this state?
Robby Villegas
Knox College
E-mail: Villegas at Knox.Bitnet