Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by crazygringo on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @03:30PM (#43336151)

Sounds really compelling.

But it doesn't seem to answer how it works in Jupyter notebooks, or if it does at all. Is the GPU acceleration done "client-side" (JavaScript?) or "server-side" (in the kernel?) or is there an option for both?

Because I've used supposedly fast visualization libraries in Google Colab before, but instead of updating at 30 fps, it takes 2 seconds to update after a click, because after the new image is rendered it has to be transmitted via the Jupyter connector and network and that can turn out to be really slow.

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Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by ivoflipse on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @03:37PM (#43336219)

Fastplotlib definitely works in Jupyterlab through jupyter-rfb https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb

I believe the performance is pretty decent, especially if you run the kernel locally

Their docs also cover this as mentioned by @clewis7 below: https://www.fastplotlib.org/ver/dev/user_guide/faq.html#what...

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Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by fpl-dev on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @03:48PM (#43336345)

Thanks Ivo!

Just to add on, colab is weird and not performant, this PR outlines our attempts to get jupyter-rfb working on colab: https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb/pull/77

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Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by crazygringo on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @04:03PM (#43336459)

Thanks. Yeah I've been baffled as to why just interactive Matplotlib with a non-local kernel is so slow. The CPU is fast (enough), the network is fast, I haven't been able to figure out where the bottleneck is either.

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Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by kushalkolar on Thursday March 13, 2025 @06:23PM (#43357803)

I just remembered, I think there is something weird with Google's servers or the network because performance was very poor even with a custom Google Cloud instance running jupyterlab, see this: https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb/issues/95#issuecomment-...

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Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by paddy_m on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @05:51PM (#43337443)

Is google colab slower than an equivalently powerful kernel running on a remote jupyter kernel? Are you running into network problems, or is it something specific to colab?

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Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by kushalkolar on Thursday March 13, 2025 @06:24PM (#43357808)

I just commented above, see this: https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb/issues/95#issuecomment-...

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Re:Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plott... by clewis7 on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @03:47PM (#43336332)

Thanks Ivo!

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