If your disk or CPU resources are limited, you might want methods to
reduce the execution time of and XSTAR run. Here are some methods:
- In most cases, you are interested in the physical conditions
in a plasma of fixed composition (usually solar). In this case, you
can define the variation type of the composition parameters as
zero. This will keep the abundances constant and can reduce the
running time by about a factor of twelve.
- Keep the number of interpolated parameters at a minimum. Two is usually sufficient. Two interpolated parameters
sampled at five points each requires 25 runs of XSTAR. Adding two
more parameters at the same sampling requires 625 XSTAR runs. With
our sample five minute (optimistically) XSTAR run, that comes out
to over 52 hours!