Make slowness warning for legend(loc="best") more accurate.

anntzer · anntzer · commit 7d6c12ac5eaf · 2019-07-26T18:59:56.000+02:00
... by actually timing the call duration.  Locally I can best-locate
legends even with plots with hundreds of thousands of points basically
instantly, so the old warning was spurious.

The new test is obviously a bit brittle because it depends on how fast
the machine running it is.  It's also slower than the test before
(intentionally, because now you *actually* need a slow-to-place legend
to trigger the warning).

The warning is only emitted after the legend has been placed, but that
seems fine -- if the best-placement is so slow that you ctrl-c the
process, you'll have a traceback anyways.  Also, spawning a separate
thread to always emit the warning after exactly 5s will likely just make
things worse performance-wise on average.
diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/legend.py b/lib/matplotlib/legend.py
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@
 """
 
 import logging
+import time
 
 import numpy as np
 
@@ -1112,13 +1113,9 @@ def _find_best_position(self, width, height, renderer, consider=None):
         # should always hold because function is only called internally
         assert self.isaxes
 
+        start_time = time.perf_counter()
+
         verts, bboxes, lines, offsets = self._auto_legend_data()
-        if self._loc_used_default and verts.shape[0] > 200000:
-            # this size results in a 3+ second render time on a good machine
-            cbook._warn_external(
-                'Creating legend with loc="best" can be slow with large '
-                'amounts of data.'
-            )
 
         bbox = Bbox.from_bounds(0, 0, width, height)
         if consider is None:
@@ -1145,6 +1142,12 @@ def _find_best_position(self, width, height, renderer, consider=None):
             candidates.append((badness, idx, (l, b)))
 
         _, _, (l, b) = min(candidates)
+
+        if self._loc_used_default and time.perf_counter() - start_time > 1:
+            cbook._warn_external(
+                'Creating legend with loc="best" can be slow with large '
+                'amounts of data.')
+
         return l, b
 
     def contains(self, event):
diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_legend.py b/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_legend.py
@@ -550,24 +550,28 @@ def test_alpha_handles():
 
 def test_warn_big_data_best_loc():
     fig, ax = plt.subplots()
-    ax.plot(np.arange(200001), label='Is this big data?')
+    fig.canvas.draw()  # So that we can call draw_artist later.
+    for idx in range(1000):
+        ax.plot(np.arange(5000), label=idx)
+    with rc_context({'legend.loc': 'best'}):
+        legend = ax.legend()
     with pytest.warns(UserWarning) as records:
-        with rc_context({'legend.loc': 'best'}):
-            ax.legend()
-        fig.canvas.draw()
+        fig.draw_artist(legend)  # Don't bother drawing the lines -- it's slow.
     # The _find_best_position method of Legend is called twice, duplicating
     # the warning message.
     assert len(records) == 2
     for record in records:
         assert str(record.message) == (
-            'Creating legend with loc="best" can be slow with large'
-            ' amounts of data.')
+            'Creating legend with loc="best" can be slow with large '
+            'amounts of data.')
 
 
 def test_no_warn_big_data_when_loc_specified():
     fig, ax = plt.subplots()
-    ax.plot(np.arange(200001), label='Is this big data?')
+    fig.canvas.draw()
+    for idx in range(1000):
+        ax.plot(np.arange(5000), label=idx)
+    legend = ax.legend('best')
     with pytest.warns(None) as records:
-        ax.legend('best')
-        fig.canvas.draw()
+        fig.draw_artist(legend)
     assert len(records) == 0
