Hi John - Yes thanks again! This did it. Plus it is a valuable lesson - it never occurred to me to look at the base class to find more useful methods. To make this cleaner I will post the complete simple working example after this message. best, John
-----Original Message----- From: John Hunter [mailto:jdh2...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, February 14, 2010 7:39 PM To: John Jameson Cc: matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net; Michael Droettboom Subject: Re: [Matplotlib-users] memory leak for GTKAgg animation On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 2:53 PM, John Jameson <jjame...@altoresearch.com> wrote: > HI, > I find the very basic animation below has a memory leak (my pagefile usage > number keeps growing in the Windows XP Windows Task Manager Performance > graph).I don't see this with the "animation_blit_gtk.py" example on: > > http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/index.html > > (which I used as a starting point for this). In "animation_blit_gtk.py" the > set_ydata() routine is used to update the line for the animation and this > does not leak. But if you call plot again with the new y_data (instead of > using set_ydata), this leaks too. Anyone have an idea on how to stop the > leak? This isn't a memory leak. The problem is that you keep adding new patches to the axes when you want just one with different data. Eg, in your loop, run this code, and you will see that the number of patches is growing: x_cir = 1.0 + 0.003*update_line.cnt cir = CirclePolygon((x_cir, 1), 0.3, animated=True, \ resolution=12, lw=2 ) ax.add_patch(cir) ax.draw_artist(cir) print 'num patches=%d, mem usage=%d'%( len(ax.patches), cbook.report_memory(update_line.cnt)) canvas.blit(ax.bbox) You should add just one patch and then manipulate the data. In this case, you are using a CirclePolygon which derives from RegularPolygon and so you can update the "xy" property http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/api/artist_api.html#matplotlib.patches.Reg ularPolygon But on testing this it looks like there is a bug in that the set_xy property setter is ignored. I worked around this in the func below by setting the private variable directly, but this looks like a bug we need to fix (Michael, shouldn't we respect the xy passed in in patches.RegularPolygon._set_xy ?). In the meantime, the following workaround should work for you w/o leaking.... def update_line(): global x, y print update_line.cnt if update_line.background is None: update_line.background = canvas.copy_from_bbox(ax.bbox) canvas.restore_region(update_line.background) x_cir = 1.0 + 0.003*update_line.cnt if update_line.cir is None: cir = CirclePolygon((x_cir, 1), 0.3, animated=True, \ resolution=12, lw=2 ) ax.add_patch(cir) update_line.cir = cir else: update_line.cir._xy = x_cir, 1 update_line.cir._update_transform() ax.draw_artist(update_line.cir) print 'num patches=%d, xy=%s, mem usage=%d'%( len(ax.patches), update_line.cir.xy, cbook.report_memory(update_line.cnt)) canvas.blit(ax.bbox) if update_line.direction == 0: update_line.cnt += 1 if update_line.cnt > 500: update_line.direction = 1 else: update_line.cnt -= 1 if update_line.cnt < 100: update_line.direction = 0 return update_line.cnt<100 update_line.cnt = 0 update_line.direction = 0 update_line.background = None update_line.cir = None ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
