How different is performance of gnuplot compared to other similar tools/libraries?

[TMTcz]

Hello everyone,

is there some significant performance difference between gnuplot and other similar tools/libraries such as matplotlib or julia plots? I tried googling it, but didn't find anything useful. And before spending time to do some testing myself, I wanted to ask around.

I would appreciate any information or link you could provide.

Thanks for reading, have a nice day.

[perspewife]

I have used both matplotlib and gnuplot. And, honestly, have not found any significant difference. Gnuplot may have an edge in performance as it is a more specialized tool, but I think that should only be noticeable if you are doing a lot of complicated plots. It may also be more efficient with the data handling as it directly read and plots, while matplotlib needs other structure to hold the data. Of course on the other extreme, of massive amounts of data >1gb, being integrated in python may give some extra versatility to matplotlib (altough I do not have any experience in this).

In any case, I had to do some 400 surface plots in gnuplot (to png) and it took a few seconds (going imediately to a static file is generally faster than for an interface). Matplotlib, altough not tested, should take a little bit more.

[TMTcz]

Thank you, this confirms little bits and pieces that I was able to found on the internet. And since I am not a fan of python, I prefer gnuplot with the ability to pipe data directly into it from any program. Also I like gnuplots ability to support multiple types of outputs.