RE: [Matplotlib-users] how to make matplotlib faster?

[Perry G. <pe...@st...>]

John Hunter wrote:

> Plots of this size should be extremely fast - you should be able to
> plot arrays 10 times this big with good performance.  From your
> description "It does first draw a default plot ..and then overplot on
> it for each subplot." it sounds like you may have interactive mode
> turned on.  This would kill your performance in a case like this,
> because the entire figure would be redrawn with the update of every
> single plotting command.  See
> http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/interactive.html and
> http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/faq.html#SHOW .
> 
> To definitively determine what mode you are in, run your script with 
> 
>  > python simple_plot.py --verbose-helpful
> 
> and verify that 'interactive is False'.  Fernando Perez's ipython has
> support for running scripts from the interactive shell, turning off
> interactive mode for the duration of the run, and then restoring it.
> 
I wondered the same thing and mentioned that to him privately
(in effect you are doing n*(n-1)/2 plots instead of n).

But that made me wonder whether or not there was a need for some
sort of switch that delayed any update for just this case where
one is looping over many plots (say you wrote a ploting function
that did this that you want to run in interactive mode, and you
wanted to use basic plotting functions like plot). Is there a  
simple mechanism to turn off interactive mode temporarily within
the function and restore it at the end? If not, could it be added?
(akin to the hold() function)

Perry