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12-Amethyst
November 11, 2022
Question

Mathcad Prime 8 is very slow - Tips or tricks to increase speed?

  • November 11, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 6889 views

Hi everyone

 

We have converted several Mathcad 15 sheets to Mathcad Prime 8 and are now seeing very slow performance, particularly when doing file opening and saving pdf. Opening a Mathcad file, recalculate it and print it to pdf earlier took around 30 seconds per file, now it takes 2-5 minutes.

 

  • We do not use reference sheets
  • We have a lot of programming constructions (e.g. if statements and lookups)
  • We use multi-threading, which improves speed a bit. We don't appear to get the full benefit when having multiple files open, i.e. the engine appears to do calculations in a single sheet at a time and then moves to the next sheet
  • For saving pdf, we are using the built-in pdf generator (i.e. the Save as command), this appears faster than printing to Adobe Acrobat pdf
  • The graphical user-interface appears delayed compared to the calculation engine (e.g. when hitting recalculate, the display is not always up-to-date, although there's a green dot in the lower left corner of the window). Part of the reason appears to be because dependent calculations are performed to the bottom of the worksheet, e.g. changing 10 variables in sequence implies that we have to wait for 10 "waves" of dependent calculations. Mathcad 15 only did the dependent calculations to the bottom of the screen and thus only needed to do the "final" dependent calculation
  • I admit that the sheets are somewhat lazy compared to "good programming practice". For example, arrays are dynamically sized but we don't set the full size initially. Also, we repeat some statements (e.g. max value of an array) rather than storing the result of the first statement. These things didn't give slow performance in Mathcad 15, however, this can of course have changed now

Can you please share any tips or tricks of your own experience on improving speed in Mathcad Prime 8?

 

Thanks!

1 reply

25-Diamond I
November 11, 2022

Unfortunately, I can't offer any tips on how to mitigate these shortcomings in Prime.
Prime's slowness in processing and sometimes quite cumbersome operation has been criticized here in the forum already several times. Unfortunately, however, no significant solutions to speed up could be offered.
Your comments sure make sense, are quite detailed and solid and if you still have some faith in PTC and the software developers and have not yet completely lost hope for improvements in future versions, you could try to contact PTC directly with this by opening a support case.

 

PEAH12-AmethystAuthor
12-Amethyst
November 15, 2022

Hi Werner, thanks for your reply.