Redraw speed

Hi In my program, I do a lot of axis changes and

    > redraws / resizes. The redraw speed of matplotlib seems
    > very bad at best - is there anything I can do to make
    > it go faster?

Start here : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/faq.html#SLOW

The best thing you can do is create a sample application that you feel
is slow that can be run on our machines -- eg create a dummy data
server to replace for your real data server. Then run your script
with some timing information to get an estimate of how fast the draw
is on your system (eg frames/second, see
examples/dynamic_image_gtkagg.py for one example which uses timing).

That way we can see if we are getting comparable performance numbers
and more importantly, may be able to suggest some improvements.

Generally the three things that make drawing slow are

* creating too many objects (use collections instead).

* using a backend which has a slow Agg->GUI widget transfer speed. I
   just checked in Ken's patch which fixes this for WXAgg.

* redrawing the entire canvas when you only need to redraw a selected
   artist or two. See
   http://www.scipy.org/wikis/topical_software/Animations -- Ken's
   patch in CVS also added support for this kind of redrawing to
   WXAgg.

Hope this helps,
JDH