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I often use Mathematica notebooks as an informal "lab notebook", plotting recent results in various tabs and such. I've noticed that these files can tend to get really large; for example, my Windows file explorer shows one to be 66MB. Additionally, it can often take about 10 seconds to finish saving a file. It also tends to be a little "laggy" when I scroll around the plots or open/close the tabs (the alt+5 titles that you can collapse) that I use to organize my work.

My first question is: What's causing such a delay? I suspect it's either just having many large datasets (~100,000 pairs) in memory, or maybe it is that when I plot them, the data is still "there"; i.e., the plot isn't just a static image or something.

My second question is: Is there a smarter way I should be doing this? My main concern is usually just producing the plots so I can analyze my data quickly. If it would be faster to raster them so they were just a simple image, that wouldn't bother me.

What's the smartest way to do this? Thank you!

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    $\begingroup$ related: 71575, 6157, 13978 $\endgroup$
    – Kuba
    Commented May 10, 2017 at 18:42

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Is rasterization going to make the notebooks smaller? It depends on the specific graphics. The documentation tools in Workbench will rasterize only those plots which actually become smaller in raster form.

I have not delved deep into this, but I think a way to make a rough estimate of the size is this:

StringLength@Compress@ToBoxes[graphics]
StringLength@Compress@ToBoxes@Image[graphics]

I noticed that graphics that are large tend to be stored in a compressed form in the notebook, so I tried to emulate the same.

If you try this for graphics = Graphics[Disk[]] then the vector form is much smaller, obviously. If you try it for graphics = Plot[Sin[x], {x, 0, 10}] then the raster form is smaller.

But rasterizing has drawbacks too: the image won't scale well anymore, and will look pretty bad on high-resolution ("retina") screens. This is why I do not like to rasterize (I use a retina Mac).

Regarding laggy scrolling: rasterizing often helps. I often rasterize for this reason. Try this with 100000 points, and rasterization becomes a must. I prefer the following function because it produces sharp images on a retina screen:

rast = Image[Rasterize[#, "Image", RasterSize -> 2 72], Magnification -> 1/2] &
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  • $\begingroup$ My general approach is to break up files into smaller linked files, as needed, but (as they say) "your mileage may vary." $\endgroup$
    – David G. Stork
    Commented May 10, 2017 at 19:01

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