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EdKambulow1-Visitor
1-Visitor
March 30, 2012
Question

Mathcad Prime - very slow

  • March 30, 2012
  • 3 replies
  • 9902 views

I use Mathcad 15.0 to do analysis of multichannel files. The files are fairly large (ie. 10 MB text files).

Unfortunately I encountered a bug in Mathcad 15.0 memory management that cause Mathcad to crash everytime I open a file due to the 32 bit limitations of how Mathcad was designed. The bug has been logged however PTC indicated that Prime should be able to fix it. So I've eagerly anticipate Prime 2.0. I just installed it and have tried to work with.

Unfortunately, from what I can tell Mathcad Prime is very inefficient at file manipulation and processing large data sets. My data import wizards were covered to READTEXT, and it took Prime 5 minutes to load the file. The same file which takes less than 30 seconds in Mathcad 15.0 to load and display. I then wasn't able to scroll on the screen for additional 4 minutes.

I've holding off migrating our company to Diadem because of the learning curve to custom program and since Prime was approaching but this Prime is completely unwieldy. At least with Mathcad 15.0 I could manage complete the data analysis and just save often.

Is there anything I'm missing that would make Prime faster?

3 replies

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VladimirN24-Ruby III
24-Ruby III
April 2, 2012

Ed Kamblulow wrote:

I use Mathcad 15.0 to do analysis of multichannel files. The files are fairly large (ie. 10 MB text files).

... The same file which takes less than 30 seconds in Mathcad 15.0 to load and display. I then wasn't able to scroll on the screen for additional 4 minutes...

You really need to display so large data on the screen?

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EdKambulow1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
April 2, 2012

I don't view it all but I do view several channel simultaneously. We sample vibration on multichannels at 250 Hz for 5 minutes. I view the data set to determine at time intervals we've reached steady state. I then select the rangel to perform a PSD analsyis and then display the results. Finally I perform some summary computations (RMS, average,etc) on the selected channels which I export to Excel.

Even if I reopened the file individually to view each channel independently, Mathcad Prime seems to have very slow file parsing as it takes 5 minutes just to read the file (less than 30 seconds in Mathcad 15) and I can't see that saving time. I would need to open the file more times instead of just once to - reloading the same data multiple times to complete the analysis, viewing and calculating on each channel.

I think fundamentally I need Mathcad Prime to be faster at file parsing (5 minutes is ridculously slow for a 10 MB file) for it to be usable.

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Loris1-Visitor
1-Visitor
April 2, 2012

An image is better than 1000 words..

http://communities.ptc.com/thread/33599?start=270&tstart=0

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LucVB1-Visitor
1-Visitor
April 2, 2012

I have the same issue with 90Mb flight test files.

Mathcad 14 takes about 30 seconds to load them, Prime 2.0 needs 50 minutes so that is a show stopper for me.

I reported it as a bug, they could duplicate it so hopefully this will be addressed with the next release.

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EdKambulow1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
April 2, 2012

Thanks. Glad to hear you reported it. I was going to log this with PTC but if you've already done that then I guess there's no need.

Its funny - the feature comparison that the marketing dept created doesn't quite show the entire picture. The lack of drop downs, the lack of highlighting, the lack of right click dialogs doesn't make Prime very easy to use in comparison to 15.0. Even the the conversion results from Mathcad 15 means its not just opening old files and viewing - but you have to readjust/reformat the new converted file to use.

Don't plan on recommending Prime 2.0 for our internal use. Don't quite thinks its ready for Prime time.

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MichaelH1-Visitor
1-Visitor
April 2, 2012

The READTEXT and READFILE functions appear to be very slow for large data sets.

You may want to consider using READPRN or READCSV if possible, which seem to work much faster.

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EdKambulow1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
April 2, 2012

Wow, READPRN does make a huge difference! That took 15 seconds to load the same file. Only problem is that it can't handle a header file nor have the ability to skip the first few lines. (I had to manually delete the first few lines). I also have a date code which it struggled with. Only function that can handle tnese is READTEXT and READFILE -which are buggy.

I have hundreds of data files, all in different directories, in this format so manually modifying each them will be very labourous - in addition to me losing that header info. Is there any work around?

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MichaelH1-Visitor
1-Visitor
April 2, 2012

Since all of the data is read into a matrix (say M), you can calculate the length (number of rows) and then re-write it to another matrix (say N) without the headers by shifting the row indices by the number of header rows. And then you can write the headers to another matrix for posterity.

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