[Swarm-Support] Time efficiency of at$createActionTo$message

[Marshall, James A R]

> Hello,
>   today I've had a rather nasty surprise to do with
> at$createActionTo$message... our model wasn't scaling well and after 4
> days of checking out my own model code I found the apparent culprit...
> at$createActionTo$message. The larger our simulation (i.e. the more
> events) the worse the behaviour of at$createActionTo$message...
> particularly I think that at$createActionTo$message does not work in
> constant time according to the position in the schedule that you wish to
> insert. When removing the calls to at$createActionTo$message and replacing
> them with my own mechanism I managed to get a 60x and upwards increase in
> execution performance (obviously the more events you schedule in the
> future, the better the improvement). This is staggering. I've looked at
> the FAQ and not turned anything up, so the purpose of this message is to
> see if anyone else has any similar experience or expects this kind of
> behaviour. The documentation also doesn't mention anything about the time
> complexity of using this method     When I find time I'll delve deeper,
> look at ways to improve this behaviour, etc. but in the meantime it seems
> that a health-warning should be put on this method and presumably similar
> ones. I'm using Swarm 2.2 pre-test 6 with Java 1.4.1 on Windows 2000 by
> the way...
>       James
> 
> ---
> Dr James A R Marshall
> Complex Systems Modelling Group (COSMIC)
> Department of Earth Science and Engineering
> Imperial College London
> Tel: +44 (0)20 7594 7493
> Fax: +44 (0)20 7594 7444
> Container World Project - http://www.ese.ic.ac.uk/research/containerworld/
> 
>