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Re: IDV questions

This archive contains answers to questions sent to Unidata support through mid-2025. Note that the archive is no longer being updated. We provide the archive for reference; many of the answers presented here remain technically correct, even if somewhat outdated. For the most up-to-date information on the use of NSF Unidata software and data services, please consult the Software Documentation first.

  • Subject: Re: IDV questions
  • Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 08:33:20 -0600
Hi Tony-

What's up with them Avs!

rockwooa wrote:


couple of questions:
I've managed to use the IDV in class a few times by being very careful not to try too much and crashing my laptop. But the students are pretty impressed and a few have asked whether they could download it to their machines and run it from home. I think I read the Unidata policies correctly in that it IS ok for them to do this and to connect to the various data servers for data? 

Yes, that's fine.  As long as it's for education and research.  They
will need a good network connection since the download itself is
23Mb and if they are accessing data from a remote server, the downloads
are long on a dialup line.
Second, you put both the 2D and Glode IDV icons on my laptop. As I understand the installation procedure, the 'install anywhere' is done just once, but the globe view uses a different startup command. How did you make the globe desktop icon? 

When I installed the IDV, it got put into a c:/Program Files/IDV_beta5
directory (or something close to that).  In that directory, there
is a Batch file runIDV.bat.  I copied that to runGlobe.bat and
changed the command line to:
jre\bin\java -Xmx512m -jar idv.jar -properties /ucar/unidata/idv/resources/globeidv.properties 

I then went to the My Computer icon, found that file, right clicked
on it and chose the Send To option to send it to the desktop as
a shortcut.  Finally, I right clicked on the new desktop icon,
selected Properties, and set the icon using the IDV.ico in
c:/Program Files/IDV_beta5
The more I use it, the more frustrated I get that I can't do much without a better machine - oh well. 

Sorry to hear that.  Hope you can get a new machine.  One thing to
do might be to change the -Xmx512m in the runIDV.bat file to
be -Xmx128m or -Xmx64m. This will reduce the max memory you
can use to be something closer to what you have, but it will also
give you an OutOfMemoryError earlier before your system starts
thrashing.  Also, if you can, try to close any other programs
that are running to reduce background memory usage.  In the end
though, you'll need a faster machine.

Are there particular things you are doing that cause it to lock
up immediately?  Surface plots are memory pigs and we are looking
at that now.  Imagery is also a hog, but depends on which images
you display (and how many).  We are also profiling that before
the next release.

Don
*************************************************************
Don Murray                               UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                        P.O. Box 3000
(303) 497-8628                              Boulder, CO 80307
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/donm
*************************************************************