[IPython-dev] Interactive Matplotlib in the browser

[Michael Droettboom]

On 10/12/2012 02:39 AM, Jason Grout wrote:
>
>> you make a single static plot of a large data set, that is way better
>> than trying to send the data to the browser and rendering it there.
>> But if you have to send hundreds or thousands of PNGs to get
>> interactivity, that benefit may be washed out.  Especially if you have
>> multiple users interacting with plots - the server could quickly grind
>> to a halt.  I think we should do tests to see how bad it gets, taking
>> into account the multiple user question.  The one performance benefit
>> that I can think of is that you can tune the level of interactivity to
>> limit the data that comes back.  For large data sets, users might be
>> willing to settle for less interactivity.  That option doesn't exist
>> when you send all the data back.
> I implemented server-side rate-limiting (see my most recent
> modifications at https://gist.github.com/3875846, for example).  Or are
> you saying that the server might not be able to render pngs for hundreds
> or thousands of users?  I wonder if we can get a better protocol than
> just a "Motion PNG" [1].
>
> A disappointing thing is that it seems to take about 100ms to render the
> example png image; it would sure be nice if that was a lot faster.

Yeah -- but solving that has nothing to do with the the browser.  I 
sense that's already quite close to optimal for what it's doing.

>
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG
>
I had ruled this out initially due to the lossy artifacts and the much 
larger encoding overhead.  But perhaps it could be provided as an 
alternative...

I think Motion PNG makes sense locally, where bandwidth is high and CPU 
time is shared between the server and the client, and Motion JPEG might 
make more sense remotely.

Mike