使用 Python 和 matplotlib 在循环中绘图时如何避免过度使用 memory

Question

I have a Python program that gets data from a measurement instrument and plots the data using matplotlib (I am on Debian Linux). The plotting is done in a separate thread, which updates the data plots at fixed time intervals. At every update, the existing lines are removed from the plot, and then the lines are re-created with the new data (yes, there might be more efficient ways, but it's not possible to just add the new data to existing lines in my situation).

After a while, the program will take up huge amounts of memory (gigabytes). This does not happen if I modify the code to skip the plotting/matplotlib part, so the use of humungeous amounts of memory is clearly related to matplotlib. If I put some pressure on the system by running another application that will consume a lot of memory, my Python program will at some point start to release the excessive memory used up by matplotlib (ending up at about 50 MB or so), Releasing the memory does not seem to have any negative effects on the operation of my program. This tells me that the large junk of memory used by matplotlib is not vital (if not useless) in my application.

How can I avoid matplotlib from picking up so much memory?

Answer 1

not sure if this will help, but have you tried using line-collections ? it should be more efficient for plotting a huge amount of lines in one go

... aside of that some lines of code that show what you're doing might help to identify the problem