This is in response to a Question about the speed and memory use of an animated DEplot. The problems are that the example's animation was slow to create, and prohibitively expensive to save in a Document.

An alternative approach is to combine multiple calls to plots:-odeplot with a call to plots:-fieldplot to supply the background flow arrows. This is a lot faster. It takes less memory to create and run, but the GUI may still consume too much resources saving it. The good news is that it's so much faster that it's not inconvenient to re-run the entire thing from scratch. And so it's quite feasible to remove all the expensive output from the Document prior to saving and thus avoid the whole resources problem.

The original questioner also wanted to visualize with resect to two varying parameters. So I've also done an implementation of that using Embedded Components and two Sliders.

Here is the old DEplot animation. It takes about 40 sec to create it animation on an Intel i7.

Here is the new combined odeplot+fieldplot animation. It takes a second or two to create its animation on an Intel i7.

Here is the DEplot in Embedded Components. It's very slow, and the image doesn't change smoothly with the sliders.

Here is the new combined odeplot+fieldplot in Embedded Components. Its image changes pretty smoothly with the sliders.

I encourage completely quitting the GUI (not just restart, or close Document and re-Open) between comparison runs of these implementations, of you want to get a really good feel for the effects of both running them as well as saving them (with and without all output).

For the Embedded Component documents, the functioning code resides inside the "initialize" button. (right-click, go to Component Properties, Action When Clicked, only if you want to inspect it.) To run those two  Documents, execute all the commands (use the triple-exclam from the menubar if you like), and then press the "initialize" button, and then move the sliders.

The difference in performance is related partly to the use of hardware datatype Arrays in the PLOT structures generated by odeplot and fieldplot. (But an `arrow` primitive would help even more!)

And (I think) there is improvement by virtue of using dsolve/numeric/parameters in the use of `odeplot`. That saves overhead from repeated cold invocations of dsolve/numeric. And DEplot doesn't support that, since it expects as argument the system of DEs and ICs. The newer `odeplot` command accepts the procedure returned by dsolve/numeric, and thus allows for efficient repeated setting of parameter values. The `fieldplot` command doesn't need the solution of the DE system at all: it just needs the DEs.

I would have considered wrapping the whole combined approach up into a single command, but it might have to accept separate options for the view ranges, in order to always look its best. A smart version might be able to deduce the computed ranges from the odeplot output, and then create the background fieldplot based on that.

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