The ODE simulation library supports an accelerated physics simulation which offers great improvements in simulation speed and memory usage, at the expense of some accuracy. The fast physics algorithm scales better than the normal physics algorithm as the number of interacting physical bodies increases. With a small number of interacting physical bodies, there may not be a great difference between the two. As the number increases, however, the benefits of fast physics will become much greater.
Fast physics may be enabled using the method enable-fast-physics. An additional iterations parameter can be set using the method set-fast-physics-iterations. The default value of 40 should give good results, but the number may be adjusted upwards for more accuracy, or downwards for better performance.