On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 7:42 PM, Eddie Schlafly wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was surprised today to notice that "subplot" was the slowest part of some
> plotting code of mine.
>
> On my machine, the last line of the following code puts ten subplots on a
> figure and records the amount of time it took to make them:
>
> >>> import matplotlib
> >>> matplotlib.use('AGG')
> >>> import time
> >>> from matplotlib.pyplot import *
> >>> def f():
> ... t = time.time()
> ... clf()
> ... for i in xrange(10):
> ... subplot(5,2,i+1)
> ... return time.time()-t
> ...
> >>>
> >>> times = [f() for x in xrange(10)]
>
> This code gives me a bunch of times that are on average about half a
> second. I expected it to be much faster as I wasn't actually plotting
> anything.
>
> Is this expected? Can I choose a faster backend or something? I've
> experimented a little but without success. I realize that 5 hundredths of a
> second per subplot isn't terrifically slow, ... but I guess I make a lot of
> plots.
>
> Thanks a lot,
>
> Eddie Schlafly
>
>
Eddie,
Calling pyplot.subplot() may be slow because it has to determine which
figure is the currently active figure, and then create a new axes object for
that figure. I would suspect that passing in the figure object and calling
add_subplot from the figure may speed things up.
Also note that v1.0.0 introduced pyplot.subplots() which will create a
figure, and an array of subplots all at once. There is also the gridspec
method that might also be of interest.
I hope that helps!
Ben Root
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