Mathcad 15 slow in M020 and M030

[hmorris]

I've been running Mathcad 15 M010 for the past couple years. I've been a using Mathcad since 1995. It runs fine with my worksheets with the occasional crash. I saw there was an update in December to M030 so I installed it yesterday. It runs extremely slow just opening and calculating a worksheet. I uninstalled and went back to M010 and it works fine. M010 will run through the caclulations in about 10-15 seconds whereas M020 or M030 take over 2-3 minutes

This is not one particular file. I tried multiple different projects and it nets the same results. I use scripting (drop down pick lists) and reference files in all my worksheets.

About 6 months ago, I did the same experiment with M020 and M010. M020 was slow as well. This was on my other PC with Windows 7 x64. The recent test was on Windows 8.1 x64.

For now I'm back to M010 in Windows 8.1....no issues with 8.1 except for when I print to adobe PDF, the filename has some Asian characters in the filename. I attached a screenshot of this issue. I can live with this. This didn't occur in W7

Any idea what may be causing the slow down between updates?

[MikeArmstrong]

Strange problem to say the least.

Is Mathcad 15 compatible with Windows 8?

Do all the files you tried have Asian text?

Mike

[VladimirN]

Operating system support (for Mathcad 15 M030 service release):

[MikeArmstrong]

Cheers Vladimir,

So the answer is no.

[hmorris]

I wouldn't say no. I say it hasn't been tested for compatibility.

This slowness issue (less the asian PDF issue) happened on Win7 and Win8.1 for M020.

I may try to do the update on my laptop that still has M010 and Win7.

[MikeArmstrong]

I wouldn't say no. I say it hasn't been tested for compatibility.

Defiantly one for PTC to answer.

Good plan and revert back with your findings.

[Werner_E]

Thats spooky, indeed. I didn't notice slowdowns when upgrading to M020 an M030, but I'm not using Win8.

You sure should open a call and reort the effects to PTC.

[hmorris]

I did a trial install of M030 on my Windows 7 laptop. Same slowdown.

[Werner_E]

Harold Morris wrote:

I did a trial install of M030 on my Windows 7 laptop. Same slowdown.

Can you create test sheets and track down the problem and separate which operations or which built-in functions are responsible for this significant (in your first post you reported a slowdown for the factor 12!)?

For instance it took me quite some time untlil I realized why some routines dealing with big matrices perform awfully slow. The reason found was that the built-in function stack() and augment(9 are MUCH slower than user written workarounds using for-loops. But thats not a M020 or M030 problem. Its there since ... ever(?) - at least it was already a MC14 problem.

My point is, that as nobody else has reported about such a significant calculation slowdown with M020 or M030, chances are, that just one specific function your calculation is probably heavily using, was unintentionally "damaged" in the maintainance release M020.

[OtfriedGeorg]

I experienced the same slow down with Mathcad 15 M020 and M030, so I uninstalled again. M010 still works fine. OSs were WinXP(32) and Win8.0(64), didn´try others. My worksheets are quite big and complicated, but that is not an issue with M010 (apart from crashes) . Don´t know about the reason either, but it looked to me as if slow down is caused by rendering of 3D-Plots. It looks like this is done by software in M020/30, what seems to be done by hardware interface in M010 and earlier (DirectX-interface?).

[Werner_E]

So the question is going back to Morris: Do your sheets also contain 3D-Plots which may be the cause for the slowdown?

I just flipped through the readme.pdf of MC15 and the only fix applied in M020 relating to 3D-plots I found was

Doesn't sound like a turning off of hardware acceleration or the like.

[hmorris]

No 3D plots. A lot of 2D plots with matrix/vector input data.

[Werner_E]

So 3D doesn't seem to be the problem.

Is there any kind of calculation which you render suspicous and could you set up a test worksheet (where this calc is called some 10^?? times in a loop) to show the slowdown. Not that I would be willing installing M010 again but I guess without doing so it doesn't make much sense opening a support call.

[hmorris]

I have a support ticket in the system. I haven't heard back after I got the initial call.

[OtfriedGeorg]

Might be on 2D plots as well. Experienced it heavily on 3D plots so I didn´t take much care on 2D, as soon as I was sure that I would not be able to fix it. Additionally I did not experience any advantage of M020/30 compared to M010 - at least for my applications (except reopening worksheets containing partial second derivatives, now keeping the partial-property, which I had asked PTC to eliminate this bug). But - just to say that - still anything is way much better than Prime!!!

[hmorris]

Here's the latest from support....

SPR 221xxxx has been submitted for this issue with our development team. We identified the cause and you can expect this to be addressed in next maintenance release of Mathcad 15.0.

[OtfriedGeorg]

glad to hear that, especially that there will be a next maintenance release of mc15. seems they didn't tell you about the cause. hope they will fix another bug by then: copying arrays does not keep their properties, like font, font size etc.