Measuring and improving performance

Abstract

As any Maple user can easily observe, a complicated Maple computation can take seconds, minutes, or more. Symbolic computation can often require a lot of computer memory as well. Computer memory requirements are dictated not only by the length of the answer (the number of terms, number of symbols, or the number of digits in numbers), but also the size of the expressions generated in intermediate steps before the final result. If you are concerned about a Maple computation taking ”too long” or ”too much memory”, the first step to trying to remedy the situation is to find out how much time or memory the computation takes. In this section we discuss ways you can monitor how these resources are being consumed.