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Anyone using insight, or idlde? [message #9363] Thu, 19 June 1997 00:00 Go to next message
Matt Phelps is currently offline  Matt Phelps
Messages: 6
Registered: June 1997
Junior Member
Is anyone using insight or idlde yet (5.0 graphical interface
tools)? I'm interested in impressions of others to see if I'm
crazy or not. I find insight EXTREMELY slow and unresponsive.
One of our users also reports random dissappearing acts for
idlde.

We're running on Sun Sparc workstations (SPARC 4, 110 Mhz,
64MB of memory in my case) with Solaris 2.5.1.

--
Matt Phelps
System Administrator
Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
mphelps@cfa.harvard.edu
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu
Re: Anyone using insight, or idlde? [message #9461 is a reply to message #9363] Thu, 03 July 1997 00:00 Go to previous message
Mirko Vukovic is currently offline  Mirko Vukovic
Messages: 124
Registered: January 1996
Senior Member
In article <33BBAA0E.CD4@sg1.cr.usgs.gov>,
Jonathan Rogness <rogness@sg1.cr.usgs.gov> wrote:
>
> mirko.vukovic@grc.varian.com wrote:
>>
>> I was at a local idl presentation (in the bay area) and was pretty
>> impressed with insight. It is indeed slow now, but wait 18 months,
>> and I bet the cpu's will start catching up.
>
> I'm not sure we should be congratulating RSI for writing some code that
> runs slowly on today's machines but, given future technology, might be
> usuable. Anybody can write code that's slow and inefficient; the trick
> is to write programs that are quick and useful!

Point well taken
>
> My only experience with Insight came last week, when we finally got the
> upgrade to v5.0. I was anxious to see if everybody's complaints had
> been accurate. I started IDL, started insight, and then tried to open
> one of the example projects. Almost two minutes later, nothing had
> happened and I killed the process off.
>
> This is running on a SGI Power Challenge supercomputer with 9
> processors, 640 MB of physical RAM and twice that in paging space. Now
> granted, there were (many) other users on the machine at the same time,
> but if it runs that slowly on this machine I have to believe that it's
> going to be more than 18 months before insight will run at a decent
> speed on, say, a Windows 95 machine.
>
> Jon

I run on windows95 and 133MHz pentium and got the examples going in 15-20
seconds.


Mirko

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Re: Anyone using insight, or idlde? [message #9465 is a reply to message #9363] Thu, 03 July 1997 00:00 Go to previous message
David Theil is currently offline  David Theil
Messages: 11
Registered: May 1996
Junior Member
> is is running on a SGI Power Challenge supercomputer with 9
> Processors, 640 MB of physical RAM and twice that in paging space.

There must have been something wrong with IDL or insight on the SGI
power challenge. Though insight was a bit slow on my 180MHz 604e
Macintosh (I would even say annoyingly slow) it certainly did not
take two minutes to open the first example. I did find lots of bugs
that RSI confirmed in Insight in the Mac Pre-release version.
Also, a group down the hall was "beta" testing IDL 5.0
and they run on a bunch of SGI machines also. They told me
that the beta version was unstable enough to be unusable in IRIX.
Perhaps the IRIX version is still buggy.

I think Insight shows some promise, especially for the new idl user.
Making plots come out the way you want is clearly the steepest part of
the idl learning curve. It does need some work before I will
want to use it. It would also be nice if insight could output an idl
script that would draw the plots.

David Theil
Re: Anyone using insight, or idlde? [message #9466 is a reply to message #9363] Thu, 03 July 1997 00:00 Go to previous message
Jonathan Rogness is currently offline  Jonathan Rogness
Messages: 7
Registered: April 1997
Junior Member
mirko.vukovic@grc.varian.com wrote:
>
> I was at a local idl presentation (in the bay area) and was pretty
> impressed with insight. It is indeed slow now, but wait 18 months,
> and I bet the cpu's will start catching up.

I'm not sure we should be congratulating RSI for writing some code that
runs slowly on today's machines but, given future technology, might be
usuable. Anybody can write code that's slow and inefficient; the trick
is to write programs that are quick and useful!

My only experience with Insight came last week, when we finally got the
upgrade to v5.0. I was anxious to see if everybody's complaints had
been accurate. I started IDL, started insight, and then tried to open
one of the example projects. Almost two minutes later, nothing had
happened and I killed the process off.

This is running on a SGI Power Challenge supercomputer with 9
processors, 640 MB of physical RAM and twice that in paging space. Now
granted, there were (many) other users on the machine at the same time,
but if it runs that slowly on this machine I have to believe that it's
going to be more than 18 months before insight will run at a decent
speed on, say, a Windows 95 machine.

Jon
Re: Anyone using insight, or idlde? [message #9471 is a reply to message #9363] Wed, 02 July 1997 00:00 Go to previous message
Mirko Vukovic is currently offline  Mirko Vukovic
Messages: 124
Registered: January 1996
Senior Member
In article <33B9A4A9.1565@magellan1.rutgers.edu>,
Axel Schweiger <axel@magellan1.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>
> In my view, INSIGHT is a complete joke. It is extremely slow and
> very cumbersumber to use. I was looking forward to a point and
> click interface that would let me plot,modify and annotate graphs
> interactively. This kludge of sliders and buttons at best seems
> 10 years behind.
>
> I would have put it in the demo applications box.
>
> As a user of IDL who uses it mostly for scientific
> processing and analysis, the graphic objects interface doesn't help
> me one bit (At least not that I can tell).
>
> Axel
> Increasingly disgruntled IDL user.
>
> David Fanning wrote:
>>
>> Matt Phelps writes:
>>
>>> Is anyone using insight or idlde yet (5.0 graphical interface
>>> tools)? I'm interested in impressions of others to see if I'm
>>> crazy or not. I find insight EXTREMELY slow and unresponsive.
>>> One of our users also reports random dissappearing acts for
>>> idlde.
>>
>> I agree with your impressions of INSIGHT. I find I don't have
>> the patience to use it.
>>
>> But I couldn't do without the IDLDE, at least in its Windows
>> incarnation. I think along with the chromochome editor that
>> this is one of the best things RSI has ever created. It's slick.
>> It works. It makes programming a pleasure. I like it a LOT!
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> David

I was at a local idl presentation (in the bay area) and was pretty
impressed with insight. It is indeed slow now, but wait 18 months, and I
bet the cpu's will start catching up. I also liked very much the
live_surface function. It is usefull in data analysis and visualisation.

regarding the editors on win95, emacs with font-locking is also very
nice. I use it as my main editor.

mirko

-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
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Re: Anyone using insight, or idlde? [message #9489 is a reply to message #9363] Tue, 01 July 1997 00:00 Go to previous message
Axel Schweiger is currently offline  Axel Schweiger
Messages: 11
Registered: November 1995
Junior Member
In my view, INSIGHT is a complete joke. It is extremely slow and
very cumbersumber to use. I was looking forward to a point and
click interface that would let me plot,modify and annotate graphs
interactively. This kludge of sliders and buttons at best seems
10 years behind.

I would have put it in the demo applications box.

As a user of IDL who uses it mostly for scientific
processing and analysis, the graphic objects interface doesn't help
me one bit (At least not that I can tell).

Axel
Increasingly disgruntled IDL user.

David Fanning wrote:
>
> Matt Phelps writes:
>
>> Is anyone using insight or idlde yet (5.0 graphical interface
>> tools)? I'm interested in impressions of others to see if I'm
>> crazy or not. I find insight EXTREMELY slow and unresponsive.
>> One of our users also reports random dissappearing acts for
>> idlde.
>
> I agree with your impressions of INSIGHT. I find I don't have
> the patience to use it.
>
> But I couldn't do without the IDLDE, at least in its Windows
> incarnation. I think along with the chromochome editor that
> this is one of the best things RSI has ever created. It's slick.
> It works. It makes programming a pleasure. I like it a LOT!
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------ -----
> David Fanning, Ph.D.
> Fanning Software Consulting
> Customizable IDL Programming Courses
> Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com
> Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com
> IDL 5 Reports: http://www.dfanning.com/documents/anomaly5.html
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