Mathematica Online Editing Performance

Question

Does anyone have any tips for improving editing performance in Mathematica Online? I am pulling my hair out... There seems to be editing lag like in early versions of online text editors, where it takes a while to catch up. I can't figure out if it is the computers I've tried, if it's a network problem, etc... So, I'm reaching out to see what your tips are and whether you have the same experience.

The part that is the most debilitating is when I have a lot of text or numbers on screen, such as a list of rules or just numeric data. Scrolling performance can't keep up. I tried to think of something that I could share, but my data is proprietary.

However, I found out that the same phenomenon also happens with large formulas, which are easy to generate. I guess you can change the 5 to a higher number if the result is shorter than about two pages (otherwise you won't be able to test scrolling). Remember to hit "show all".

Solve[Total[c@# x^#&/@Range@5]==0,x]

On the computers and networks I've tested in Chrome, when I randomly scroll up and down rapidly for several seconds, it takes more than 10 seconds after releasing the mouse scroll wheel for the window to stop scrolling.

Obviously that isn't a normal use case. Normally what happens is I keep missing where I intend to click, move, or type, because of the editing lag. The "ghost scrolling" is just a way to confirm that I'm not hallucinating.

Answer 1

From the file browser that is shown on login: Preferences->Evaluation->Output Cell Format->Always Use Bitmaps. For notebooks, suppress as much output as possible, and shorten input cells as much as possible. When you must have a long input cell, manually insert line breaks rather than using the automatic wrapping algorithm. When evaluating entire notebooks, make sure you hit "evaluate all" when the viewport is at the top (so you can see the top cell in the notebook); this won't guarantee the correct evaluation order, but does make it much more likely.