Question: sluggish editor balks on galaxy

I'm working on a 3D program that plots stars, star clusters and other objects of interest against a model of the Milky Way. The guts of this program create a few hundred points (< 2000) that represent stars, and move them a little bit in random directions to create a cloud effect. Then the animate procedure rotates them about the center of the galaxy. I would like to add more stars and do more things with them, but I am encountering a very sluggish editor, suggesting that Maple is imposing a memory limit. The Activity Monitor says that Maple is using 140 MB, so gigabytes of RAM remain available. Furthermore, if I save the plot as an animated gif, I can run half a dozen copies simultaneously in separate browser windows without encountering noticeable slowdown. But I can't elaborate the program without better performance from the editor.

The program is written in the Document interface. I tried saving it to the classic interface, but that didn't seem to help, and I found it difficult to edit.

Ideas sought.

Mac w OS X, 10.4.6, 3.06 GHz Intel Duo with 4GB RAM, Maple14 Student