On 2009-10-07 18:11+0200 Paul Boley wrote: > > On Tue, 6 Oct 2009 11:18:18 -0700 (PDT) > "Alan W. Irwin" <ir...@beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote: > > >> >> Of course, such a review becomes much more urgent if you present >> evidence that other plot libraries produce shade plots much faster >> than PLplot. :-) >> > > Dear Alan, > > Regarding examples of faster shade plots, I can say it's difficult to > find anything slower. For example, ds9 can load the same fits data and > make a continuous grayscale shade (i.e. shades >> 50) plot in a > negligible amount of time (< 1s). I also tried imshow() from matplotlib > for Python: similar results to ds9. > > I think the drawing calls are the limiting factor. PLplot draws the > image column by column (or perhaps even pixel by pixel) AS it is > computing the shade values. For 50 shades, it sweeps through the > entire array 50 times and issues tens to hundreds, if not thousands, of > drawing calls each time.
Your timing experience shows plshades and plshade are quite inefficient (factor of 60 or more) compared to other plotting packages so I hope somebody will step forward to deal with this issue. > I wanted to check this with a profiler, but > alas, adding CFLAGS (i.e. -pg and -g for gcc) to the CMake setup PLplot > uses appears to be non-trivial and I ran out of patience trying to > figure out how to do it. That part is easy. Set gcc flags with the CC environment variable, e.g., export CC='gcc -g -pg' _before_ running cmake for an intially empty build tree. Those flags will be used from then on for that build tree whenever gcc is invoked indirectly by make commands. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list Plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
