Prime lags after extensive processing

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

I understand your frustration. It is EXTREMLY annoying when a tool tool does not do what you intend it to do.


Before someones tries to flame me, please note that this post uses humor, analogies and other figures of style in order to attempt to be distracting, entertaining while still informative. I am NOT using sarcasm (Dr Cooper, I am not making fun of you, promised), nor is there any intend to harm anyone (even teenagers!)




From reading your posts, it looks like this stems for a number of causes.

Let me give you my observations:

1) You do not have a lemon:
In the car business, you can get a lemon, Cars have 1000 of parts working together, most of these can wear out and needs to be within various tolerances. Some cars will have 1 or more defective parts, or 2 parts that are both in the oposit extremes of their bounds and causing issues because of this.
On a calculator, you have basically 6 parts: the CPU, the RAM, the Flash, the LCD, the keyboard and the battery.
- You know that the battery is down when it does not hold a charge. And battery do wear down, we are used to that
- You know that the screen is broken when it has pixels that do not show, this is what the factor test verifies
- You know that the keyboard is broken when keys stop working (and that again is easy to test)
- You know that the flash has faults (it does, just like a Hard drive), so the SW is written knowing this and takes care of hiding it.
- Ram and CPU don't break. They either work or they do not. There is no middle ground that causes issues.

So, basically, what I am saying is that 'lemon' on such a device is not really something that is possible. You can have a defective unit (LCD issue, keyboard issue...), but I have never seen a calculator (Prime or other) that just 'kind of worked' because of a physical defect.


2) Software crashes, memory corruption:
In any complex computer system, the memory can become corrupt, thus causing the system to become unstable.
Since there is 2 types of read/write memory in Prime (RAM and Flash), you have 2 types of corruption, caused by 2 different types of issues and with 2 different types of results.

Flash. This is where your files are stored. Prime will save stuff in the flash when you turn it OFF, or when you exit a program source code. These files contains prety much anything that you create (notes, programs, apps...).
These really represent your work. Just like with word or excel a couple of years ago, the best advice is: save often. To do that, as stated above, turn the calc OFF and ON on a regular basis.

RAM can become a 'mess'. Similarly to a teenager's room, there is no mechanism for 'cleaning' the RAM besides restarting the system (or kicking the teenager's out of the house and calling the haz-mat team).
RAM becomes a mess when you repetitively create lots of objects in it. After a while, the ream becomes a mine field of used/unused locations and it takes longer and longer to figure out where you can and can not walk (ie, the teenager's room's carpet slowly disappears underneath the trash, making it harder and hard to walk all the way to the window to open it and let the stale air out). Thus the system slows down...

RAM can become corrupted. To the SW, the RAM is full of numbers, and nothing looks more like a number than another number! Number don't smell, thus if the SW expects a number in a spot to have a given meaning, and the wrong number is stored there, there is no ways for the SW to detect it. When the wrong thing is stored somewhere in RAM, this is RAM corruption. This usually leads to system crashes, or very visibly wrong behaviors.

If data in flash is corrupted (which would be caused by the SW saving corrupted data, not by the flash crapping out (yes, it is a technical term!)) then you can loose the data in this file, AND upon restart of the Calc, the system will reload the corrupted data, At that point, you are back to corrupted RAM symptom.

You can fix RAM issues by simply rebooting the calculator (at which point, any non-saved work will be lost, but saved files will not).
To fix corrupt files, you can simply override them with new ones, if possible, (at which point all the REST of your work stays intact), or erase everything.




3) So, what can you do?
From reading your post, it looks like you are doing some prety darn 'big'/'complex' stuff. I mean you are talking about over 3000 record in the spreadsheet! This is big for such a calculator.
Anyway, it does not mean that it can not do it, if coaxed carefully.
BTW, there is a max of 10000 lines because it was recognized that 1000 was not enough (for example the datastreamer can easily generate 1000 lines, so 10000 was used).

I have not seen your program, but my first guess is that you are not using the most efficient ways to deal with your very large dataset. your comments about your frustration with the programming language leads me to think (and I might be wrong), that you do not have extensive experience programming. This would explain your frustration reading the manual/UG (which assumes that you know how to program and that you do know/understand the subtelty of computer programming; The UG are not programming lessons, that takes full books by itself).
Alternatively, you actually ARE experienced and are frustrated by the fact that you do not feel that you have enough information in the UG, in this case, I appologize).


To get back to the tool analogy, it might be that you are trying to sink a screw with a hammer, and are frustrated because it does not work well. Banging harder does seem to get the screw in, but it does not hold well in the wood.
The question is: now what?
- Keep banging, after all it kinds of work, even if every once in a while it break the hammer (prime in this case)...
- Switch to a nail, or a screwdriver (but Prime might NOT have such items, leaving you with no alternatives)
- Discover glue?


To exit the tool analogy you seems to be driving Prime close to it's limits. Some of them might be physical, some might be imposed by the HP design and implementation.
When you get any tool close to it's limits, it is critical to really understand the tool and all that it offers, its strengths and weaknesses (and limitations).

The calculator has tricks to deal with strings, Spreadsheet is a complex app that itself where they are multiple ways to do things, some being more effective than others.
It might be that there is no ways to make your program work well in Prime, but it might be that they are ways to make it work much better than it currently is also.
HP is also continuously improving Prime (No forward looking statements there, past behavior being no prediction of future performances), but it seems appropriate to assume that HP will continue delivering improvements in Prime, which will hopefully push the limits of Prime further and further as times goes.

So, don't loose hope and keep posting, asking questions and you will get help.

Regards, Cyrille