Very slow array creation (and Benchmark iterate error)

General Usage Performance
5

Could you give more details on the @btime error? I can’t reproduce using the code you posted above and running @btime create_FoodWeb(BM, Ropt,γ)

That said the suggestions given above help quite a bit with performance, the following slightly simplified version gives benchmark results between 1 and 15 seconds (trials are quite variable maybe due to the randomness in the while condition?)

I’ve added some comments as I’m not 100% sure my simplifications haven’t accidentally changed your algorithm, so do double check!

using Distributions, Random, BenchmarkTools

# note BM is not required as an input to this function
# Julia convention is to only capitalise types, not variable names
function create_foodWeb(Ropt, γ, no_plant, no_animal)

  function create_L(bm, Ropt, γ, no_plant)
      x = (bm ./ (bm' .* Ropt))'
      L = @. ( x * exp(1.0 - x) )^γ
      L[:, 1:no_plant] .= 0.0
      L[L .<= 0.01] .= 0.0
      return L # return is a keyword rather than a function
  end
  
  # preallocating arrays 
  foodWeb = zeros(no_plant + no_animal, no_plant + no_animal)
  L = zeros(size(foodWeb)...)
  bm = zeros(no_plant + no_animal) 

  condition = true
  while condition
      # assigning directly rather than creating new BM_A/BM_P arrays and vcating
      bm[1:no_plant] = sort(rand(Uniform(10^0, 10^6), no_plant))
      bm[no_plant+1:end] = sort(rand(Uniform(10^2, 10^12), no_animal))

      L = create_L(bm, Ropt, γ, no_plant)
      foodWeb .= 0.0 # setting existing array to zero
      foodWeb[L .> rand()] .= 1.0 # note rand() already samples from Uniform(0,1)
      # removed the x->x>0 as entries in foodWeb are either 0 or 1 anyway
      condition = any(sum(foodWeb, dims=1) + sum(foodWeb, dims=2)' .== 0.0)
  end

  return bm, L, foodWeb
end

Ropt = 100
γ = 2
no_plant = 8 
no_animal = 12

@benchmark create_foodWeb(Ropt, γ, no_plant, no_animal)