Hi John, On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, John Hunter wrote: > >>>>> "Darren" == Darren Dale <dd...@co...> writes: > Darren> I think we could get a performance boost if all > Darren> similar ticks were passed together to draw_markers, > Darren> right now they a are passed independently. > > We could, but it would require some redesign. Tick is a > class, and the axis contains a list of ticks. Thus it would > take some top-level redesign. I'd also encourage looking at how the Ticks are implemented. I believe that for simple plots (say, simple_plot.py), the tick drawing is what dominates rendering time, at least in the WxAgg backend (which is dominated by the Agg rendering time). I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case for most backends. As far as I can tell, each tick mark is a separate Line2D with 2 points and have all the available properties of a Line2D. That seems like a fine approach (certainly easy), but it's definitely overkill. My speed tests say that rendering one thousand lines with two points is a lot slower than rendering two lines with one thousand points (easy enough to test). That means tick drawing can easily be the performance bottleneck. I like Darren's and Paul's suggestion (set line properties once, then have the ticks be a simple list of pen up / pen down). I believe major and minor ticks would need to have different properties, but it's still only 2 set of properties. I understand that this might mean a significant redesign, but the performance boost might be worth it. Thanks, --Matt PS: Someone might want tick marks to have all the flexibility that they currently enjoy. My guess is that this would be unusual (I don't see any examples that use this flexibility), and that such cases could just add custom lines themselves.