Simulation performance
General performance information about Java or Eclipse typically applies to the CIF simulator as well. This page provides additional information specific to the CIF simulator.
Closing the simulator
Closing the simulator ensures that all its resources are freed, and become available for other applications. The CIF simulator however, may ask you to press Enter to confirm termination of the simulator. If asked, as long as you haven’t pressed Enter yet, the status of the console will still show it’s running, and the application can’t release its resources.
Slow starting of the simulator
If simulation is slow to start, you can try a different Java compiler. You can also try to compile the model once, reducing the start time of the simulator for repeated simulations.
Slow termination of the simulator
If termination of the simulator is slow, this may be related to the trajectory data output component. If its prettifying option is enabled, it will read the trajectory data file after the simulation terminates, and write the whole file again in a prettier from. This may take some time, especially on slow remote/network file systems or storage devices. Disabling the option or the trajectory data output may solve this problem, as may switching to a faster file system or storage device.
Value simplification
By applying the Simplify values CIF to CIF transformation before simulation, you may be able to simplify the specification, and thus improve the performance of both starting up the simulator, as well as the actual simulation.
Simulation options
Various simulation options can be tweaked to increase the simulation performance:
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Reducing the amount of console output significantly improves simulation performance.
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By disabling certain output components, the simulator needs to do less work, and this may improve the performance of the simulation.
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The performance and perceived 'smoothness' or 'fluency' of visualizations can be influenced via the frame rate and simulation speed.
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By decreasing the maximum allowed length of a single time transition, shorter time transitions are calculated, which takes less time. After the shorter time delay, the simulator will calculate the remainder of the time transition. Essentially, the time transitions are cut into parts, which are calculated separately, over time. As such, the calculation time is spread out over time as well. This can make SVG visualizations feel more fluent. However, each time transition calculation has a certain amount of overhead, so reducing the maximum delay too much is not a good idea.
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By disabling the complete mode, the simulator has to perform less work to calculate the possible transitions, improving the simulation performance.
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The ODE solver options can be used to make the ODE solver faster, usually at the expense of accuracy. For instance, increasing the various tolerances reduces the number of calculations needed by the ODE solver, but makes the calculated trajectories less accurate. Switching algorithms may also improve the performance, as may increasing the maximum check interval.
External functions synchronous execution
Using synchronous execution for external user-defined functions reduces their execution overhead.