[matplotlib-devel] Patch rough-draft

[Joe <gar...@us...>]

Hello John and other devels,

John, you were right on the money in relation to the memory leak that I wrote 
about in the previous message.  Here's a rough draft of an attempt to patch 
that up.  This is my first (meaningful) attempt to submit a patch anywhere, 
so please forgive any errors in the process.  It was made with >patch -p ...  
I think that is the accepted way to make a patch, but I'm not sure.

At first I wanted to plug this up by resuing the "cached" variable (by 
removing the last key from the .keys() method if the number of entries got 
too big), but I didn't like how that turned out so I decided to add a list 
which was sorted by last use.  Removal when there became too many items was 
performed on the least recently used entry.  I think that this way turned out 
for the better.

What might improve things is if there was a way to check how big the data 
structures which we are caching are in memory.  The first thought that came 
to my mind was to dump the structures to a Python string via cPickle and 
count the bytes used, but this would be too slow I think.  At the very least, 
the value could be supplied by the .matplotlibrc file, but I'm not very sure 
where all those values are read in.

Anyways too much talk for such a small fix,

Take care and happy coding,
Joe