Re: [Matplotlib-users] Memory leak using matplotlib

[Eric F. <ef...@ha...>]

Eric,

Not much progress, I think.  Memory leaks seem endemic to the gui 
backends, although Tk is by far the worst.  I have been trying to 
understand the gtk case in the hope of discovering some simple change in 
mpl code that might eliminate the problem there and turn out to be 
applicable to the other backends as well.  But I have not found the 
source of the problem, and it seems to occur even in a very simple test 
gui script using pure pygtk, with no mpl.  I need to do more testing to 
find out whether the gtk problem is specific to use of gtk.Toolbar, or 
whether it will occur with any nested widgets.  It seems that widgets 
are not getting destroyed completely; maybe there are some references 
lurking somewhere in the dark.  With gtk, the garbage collector does not 
find any cycles that it can't deal with, but if I remember correctly 
from earlier testing, this is not the case with Tk.

As a partial workaround, if you don't need the toolbar, try setting
rcParams['toolbar'] = None

This may make the leak much smaller.  I think the toolbar causes 
problems in all guis simply because it increases the complexity and 
number of widgets being tracked, if for no other reason.

I would be delighted if a gui guru would emerge with a thorough 
explanation and solution for the memory leaks occurring with repeated 
opening and closing of windows.

Eric



Pellegrini Eric wrote:
> Hi evebrybody,
>  
> I started a discussion one week ago about a problem of memory leak using 
> the following code:
>  
> ********************************************************************************
> from Tkinter import *
> from matplotlib.backends.backend_tkagg import FigureCanvasTkAgg
> import pylab
>  
> def display():
> mat = pylab.zeros((100,100))
> pylab.ioff()
> image = pylab.matshow(mat)
> pylab.ion()
> pylab.close()
> can = FigureCanvasTkAgg(image, master=frame)
> can.show()
> can.get_tk_widget().grid(row = 0,column = 0)
>  
> root = Tk()
> frame = Frame(root)
> frame.grid(row = 0,column = 0)
> canvas = Canvas(frame, width = 240, height = 240, relief = "sunken", bg 
> = "white")
> canvas.grid()
> button = Button(root,text="DisplayMatrix",command = display)
> button.grid(row = 1,column = 0)
> *******************************************************************************
>  
> up to now, I have not found any way to solve it and unfortunately the 
> proposed hints did not solve the problem (gc_collect(), clf(), cla()). 
> Is there something new about this ?
>  
> thanks
>  
> Eric
> 
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