Functional Limits

Hard Limits

The following hard limits are designed into Tecplot 360. Your workstation’s memory may, however, not always be sufficient to allow the product to reach these limits.

Table 1. Hard limits for Tecplot 360
Item	Limit
Maximum number of data points per data set	Quintillions (limited by memory)
Maximum number of data points per zone	Quintillions (limited by memory)
Largest floating point absolute value	10¹⁵⁰
Smallest non-zero floating point absolute value	10^-150
Maximum number of datasets	2048
Maximum number of zones	More than 2 billion
Maximum number of variables	More than 2 billion
Maximum number of frames	2048
Maximum number of pages	2048
Maximum number of macro variables	400
Maximum number of value blank constraints	8
Maximum number of contour groups	8
Maximum number of geometries	Limited only by memory
Maximum number of polylines per line geometry^[1]	50
Maximum number of points per circle or ellipse	720
Maximum number of custom label sets	Limited only by memory
Maximum number of custom labels per set	5000
Minimum frame width or height	0.1 inches
Maximum frame width	500 inches
Maximum streamtraces per frame	32,000
Maximum number of streamtrace steps	10,000
Maximum number of color map overrides	16
Maximum preview width for EPS files	1024
Maximum preview height for EPS files	1024
Maximum number of user-defined color map control points	50
Maximum number of raw user-defined color map entries	800
Maximum number of characters in variable name	128
Maximum number of characters in zone title	128
Maximum number of characters in dataset title	256
Maximum number of views per view stack	16
Maximum number of characters in an auxiliary data string	32,000
Line length limit in ASCII .dat files (character limit per line)	32,000

Table 2. Hard Limits for plot styles
Item	Limit
Printing Gouraud shaded plots with continuous flooding	On screen or exported bitmap image only
Printing plots with translucency	On screen or exported bitmap image only

Soft Limits

The following soft limits may be changed by editing your Tecplot 360 configuration file. The configuration file, tecplot.cfg, is installed in your Tecplot 360 home directory.

Table 3. Soft limits for Tecplot 360
Limit	Soft Limit	Hard Limit	Macro Parameter
Points per line^[2]	20000	Quintillions	MAXPTSINALINE
Contour levels	150	5,000	MAXNUMCONTOUR
Characters per text label	16,000	100,000	MAXCHRSINTEXTLABELS
Picked objects	1500	More than 2 billion	MAXNUMPICKOBJECTS
Load on demand - min threshold	0.3	0^[3]	LODTHRESHOLDMINFRACT
Load on demand - max threshold	0.7	1	LODTHRESHOLDFRACT
Available processors	0^[4]	64	MAXAVAILABLEPROCESSORS

1. A polyline is a continuous series of line segments, and can be a subset of a line geometry.

2. Points per line is the limit on the number of points allowed in the following: line segment geometries, stream termination lines, and contour lines. For line segment geometries, this is the total number of points used in all polylines contained in the geometry.

3. LODTHRESHOLDMINFRACT may not be less than 0 (the given hard limit is the lower bound, not the upper limit as with the other hard limits).

4. If MAXAVAILABLEPROCESSORS is 0, Tecplot 360 queries the hardware for the number of processors and uses that value.