Problem

As part of this discussion in an issue in the mplcairo project, it became apparent that there is no "official", detailed guide on how to optimize animations with matploblib for speed.

I am developing a library for compositing & rendering animations, which can use matplotlib as one of multiple "backends" for generating layers. I am currently in the process of writing documentation for it. As a part of it, I am trying to provide a brief introduction into optimizing the usage of matplotlib for speed.

From experience I know that there are many approaches for this. The better you understand matplotlib and its internal facilities, the more you can optimize this task - e.g. like suggested here. There are tons of blog posts about this topic scattered across the internet. matplotlib's documentation also mentions some relevant concepts here and there.

Suggested Improvement

What I am essentially missing is a good introduction and overview in one place, ideally within the official documentation of matplotlib, to which I can point people (i.e. link in my documentation).