[Matplotlib-users] Saving figure instance for reuse

[Jesper L. <jes...@gm...>]

Hi Matplotlib users

I have an application where performance is critical and matplotlib is
the performance bottleneck. I am making a lot of figures using the
same basic setup of the figure. And from my profiling I can see that
this basic setup accounts for most of the CPU time. Let us say that I
make a given figure including some axes. My questions are:

1. Can I make a copy of this figure including axes (copy.deepcopy does
not work on Figure objects) and use the copy for plotting on?

2. And how? Should I use the frozen method somehow?

I did do something similar some years back. But at the time I removed
the stuff I had drawn on the figure. I would like to avoid this for
two reasons: 1) Thread safety, I must be able to draw figures in
several simultaneous threads and 2) I really had to go into some
low-level details in matplotlib (not a show-stopper, but for
maintenance reasons I would like to keep the code as clear as
possible).

Best regards,
Jesper