title: gnuplot vs Matplotlib
body: <p>I've started on a project graphing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tomcat" rel="noreferrer">Tomcat</a> logs using <a href="http://gnuplot-py.sourceforge.net/" rel="noreferrer">gnuplot-py</a>, specifically correlating particular requests with memory allocation and garbage collection. What is the 
  collective wisdom on gnuplot-py vs <a href="http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/" rel="noreferrer">Matplotlib</a> for Python graphing. Are there better graphing libraries out there I haven't heard of?</p>
  
  <p>My general considerations are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>While gnuplot has large amounts of documentation, gnuplot-py doesn't. How good is documentation community for Matplotlib?</li>
  <li>Are there things which gnuplot can do, but gnuplot-py can't? </li>
  <li>Does Matplotlib have better Python support?</li>
  <li>Are there are big show stopping bugs in either? Annoyances?</li>
  <li>Currently gnuplot is graphing 100,000's of points, I'm planning on scaling this up to millions. Should I expect problems? How well does Matplotlib handle this?</li>
  <li>Ease of use, turnaround time for gnuplot vs Matplotlib?</li>
  <li>How easy would it be to port existing gnuplot-py code to Matplotlib?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>How would you approach this task?</p>