New Liveplots Release

I recently blogged about Liveplots. I have just released another version with a very important improvement.

Before, even though plot server was running on a separate process, there was still a small overhead for the calling code since the plotting function had to be evaluated (and data piped to Gnuplot) before the execution returned to your simulation. To improve matters, I have implemeted queueing of the plotting calls, so that now, any call to the plot server returns immediately, allowing the main code to run at maximum speeds. In the simple.py example the speed improvement was greater the 10x!!. This of course mean that the plotting runs asynchronously to the simulation, and depending on the rate of plot creation, plotting can lag behind somewhat.

To make this new feature even nicer, it is implemented as a queuing decorator so that future expansion of the plotting API can be done whithout worrying about the queueing machinery a simple @enqueue decorator to the plot function will do the magic.

Enjoy!