[mesa-users] pgstar slowdown

[Matthew Clayton]

Hi all,

I use pgstar a lot to see live plots of simulations I run, it's great. =]

However, when running reasonably long (10k models +) simulations using pgstar, I've noticed that it starts to use a lot of processor time* and cause the simulation to slow down considerably (in a "factor of 10" kind of sense). By turning different plots on and off I've been able to work out that this is due to drawing plots like the summary history plot, which show the past behaviour of the model (as opposed to, say a plot that shows a profile through the current model). I think what's going on is that every time the plot is updated, pgstar is drawing a point (or line segment) for every model in the star's history, which eventually gets quite slow and can lead runs to grind to a halt.

I've been able to circumvent this problem by having the plots updated less often (pgstar_interval = large number) or (in the case of the summary history) manually truncating the plot to only show recent models (Summary_History_xmin = slightly less than current model number), neither of which is very satisfactory.

I'm wondering whether anyone else is having this problem, or whether it suggests that my X Window environment is set up in some inefficient way or some such. If this is a general problem, is there a general workaround? Perhaps pgstar could be made to only draw a certain maximum number of points on any plot, and start missing out intermediate values if it's asked to draw more than this number. Or maybe it does that already and my problem is coming from something else. Either way, I'd welcome some input from anyone who's experienced this issue or has ideas about how to fix it.

Cheers,

Matthew

(obligatory data, in case it's relevant: I'm using version 7624 on an Ubuntu machine)

*Well, specifically it's Xorg using processor time
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