title: matplotlib: faster PDF generation?
body: <p>I would like to use <a href="http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/">matplotlib</a> to generate a number of PDF files. My main problem is that matplotlib is slow, taking order of 0.5 seconds per file.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to figure out why it takes so long, and I wrote the following test program that just plots a very simple curve as a PDF file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import matplotlib
  matplotlib.use('Agg')
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  
  X = range(10)
  Y = [ x**2 for x in X ]
  
  for n in range(100):
      fig = plt.figure(figsize=(6,6))
      ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
      ax.plot(X, Y)
      fig.savefig("test.pdf")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But even something as simple as this takes a lot of time: 15–20 second in total for 100 PDF files (modern Intel platforms, I tried both Mac OS X and Linux systems).</p>
  
  <p>Are there any tricks and techniques that I can use to speed up PDF generation in matplotlib? Obviously I can use multiple parallel threads on multi-core platforms, but is there anything else that I can do?</p>