Session save slow for molecular surfaces

[meng@…]

Takes 10 seconds to save a session with 4hhb with molecular surfaces (0.2 seconds to restore session). Why so slow?

Begin forwarded message:

From: Elaine Meng
Subject: ChimeraX sessions are YUGE
Date: July 27, 2016 at 4:39:25 PM PDT
To: chimera-programmers@…

Maybe this is a totally known thing, in which case just ignore me.
Elaine

I saved sessions in Chimera and ChimeraX with the basically the same contents: a fairly small 4-chain protein, hemoglobin (4HHB) displayed as spheres with (hidden) molecular surfaces for both main and ligand. The only difference is that the chains are separately surfaced and surfaces are in 8 models in ChimeraX instead of 2.

What I was actually trying to do was to come up with similar-looking lighting settings in ChiX as used for Chi1 in the 3D printing scripts.

Anyway, it took a really long time to save the ChimeraX session, and you can see a significant size difference by listing my home directory on plato:

crick.31% ls -l ~/*3dp*

748 -rw------- 1 meng ferrin 759046 Jul 27 16:22 /home/socr/a/meng/3dp-3.py

10620 -rw-r--r-- 1 meng ferrin 10845566 Jul 27 16:23 /home/socr/a/meng/cx-3dp-3.cxs