Discussion Forum

Hi Jacopo,

Some of the ideas in this blog post migh be of interest: https://www.comsol.com/blogs/minimize-your-model-file-size-with-storing-solution-techniques/

Best regards, Magnus

Hi Jacopo,

I know this issue in very large and especially time dependent models. Complex postprocessing may take even longer than solving the model. A method that worked for me was to define variables that evaluate during solving instead of doing it in postprocessing. E.g. you can do integrations in nonlocal couplings instead of doing them in postprocessing. Now, key to it is to store those variables in state variables. This way they become part of the solution and don't need to be recalculated during postprocessing. A normal model variable will be recalculated each time you call it in postprocessing, although it had been calculated during solving. The state variables are stored in the solution. Their disadvantage is that they don't hold a unit. You need to take care of that by yourself. During solving those additional calculations do not significantly increase the runtime, at least in the cases (mostly integrations) I was running.

The underlying problem to this is that postprocessing in Comsol runs in interpreted JAVA code, while everything during solving runs in C code. Well that is more or less my interpretation of all that, nobody can look under Comsol's hood and it is neither documented nor communicated what is really going on. I had asked the Comsol folks many times to bring the postprocessing to speed.

Ah, Magnus was faster in between.

Hope this can help, cheers, Edgar

Dear Edgar and Magnus,

thanks for your replies, they've been helpful. Just one thing I've noticed: when I perform time analysis and I use mphgetu to retrieve the raw solution, although I selected only a specific domain for the output, I get the full solution. This means that actually the full results are stored somewhere, even if in the result nodes I see only the selected output. Is this a known behaviour?

thank you again,

Best Jacopo

Hi Jacopo

You can use mphxmeshinfo to get the numbering of the DOFs of the solutions as they are numbered while solving. This numbering doesn't change even you choose to not save some of the results in the solution vector.

mphgetu always returns the full solution vector using the numerng given by mphxmeshinfo even in the case where you chose to not save some of the results. The returned u will contain zeros in the places where results were not saved.