Question: Performance in Point plotting

  Hello,

  I am attempting to do a 3d pointplot in spherical coordinates for up to 1 million points using the pointplot3d command, the problem is Maple 11 takes a extremely long time to do this (hours), and eats up large amounts of memory and even once the plot is made Maple proceeds to lag so much it becomes impossible to do anything else. I was wondering if there were any alternative methods, or otherwise ways to improve performance doing this sort of computationally intensive task. Currently I am feeding the points to maple from a txt file using the readdata command. I have a fairly fast desktop (built for gaming) and am running 32-bit Fedora 9. The actual cpu usage seems to end after 10-20 minutes but then it seems to take an extremely long time for the graphics to show up meanwhile memory usage is up to 500-600 megs. Can someone help?

 Thanks