title: Speed up Matplotlib?
body: <p>I've read <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/911655/gnuplot-vs-matplotlib">here</a> that matplotlib is good at handling large data sets.  I'm writing a data processing application and have embedded matplotlib plots into wx and have found matplotlib to be TERRIBLE at handling large amounts of data, both in terms of speed and in terms of memory.  Does anyone know a way to speed up (reduce memory footprint of) matplotlib other than downsampling your inputs?</p>
  
  <p>To illustrate how bad matplotlib is with memory consider this code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import pylab
  import numpy
  a = numpy.arange(int(1e7)) # only 10,000,000 32-bit integers (~40 Mb in memory)
  # watch your system memory now...
  pylab.plot(a) # this uses over 230 ADDITIONAL Mb of memory
  </code></pre>