# Current State of Live Plots in Atom/Juno?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Created:** [October 27, 2019, 10:10pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379 "2019-10-27T22:10:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 12\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![anon92994695](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ce7236/32.png) [@anon92994695](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/anon92994695)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2019, 10:10pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/1 "2019-10-27T22:10:59Z")

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What is the current status of live plotting/updating plots in Juno/Atom?

My ultimate hope is to have low latency 3-D scatter plots. So far I’ve tried every example I can involving tricks with GR, using gui(), etc. Then I tried Makie(can’t install correctly on my laptop due to HW so I’m stuck using CairoMakie backend). No luck, everything generates a new plot, or doesn’t display at all. The new plot for each animation step tanks my RAM insanely fast.

Would it be over-kill to send the data over ZMQ to a JAVA/JS plotting application or something? Is there something really easy I’m missing out on? I can offer a minimum working example, but honestly its just the following pseudo code:

```julia
a = scatter( data )
for i in 1:500
    update data
    update display
end 

```

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**Author:** ![heliosdrm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/heliosdrm/32/3851_2.png) [@heliosdrm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/heliosdrm)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2019, 11:18pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/2 "2019-10-27T23:18:47Z")

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Not really “live”, but if an animation stored in a movie file is sufficient for your needs, GR is quite fast and cheap:

exampleanimation.jl:

```julia
x = randn(20)
y = randn(20)
z = randn(20)
GR.inline("mp4")
println(ENV["GKS_FILEPATH"])
for i = 1:500
    x .= randn(20)
    y .= randn(20)
    z .= randn(20)
    scatter3(x, y, z)
end
GR.inline("svg");

```

(After loading GR and making the first plot out of this file):

```julia-repl
julia> @time include("exampleanimation.jl")
/tmp/juliayYRwSm.mp4
  9.097182 seconds (408.12 k allocations: 20.651 MiB, 0.07% gc time)
"svg"

```

The file name in `tmp` is where I can find the movie after the file is executed.

Run in Intel i3 @ 2.50GHz, 8GiB RAM, with Ubuntu 16.04.5-LTS

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**Author:** ![anon92994695](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ce7236/32.png) [@anon92994695](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/anon92994695)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2019, 11:22pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/3 "2019-10-27T23:22:57Z")

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Thanks for the reply!

Unfortunately I do need to see the plot live its the output of a simulation, and there’s a lot of wasted time creating then watching the entire run while debugging/fixing params.

That being said, is there a way to stream from a MP4/video file while it’s being written? or cast a video stream to icecast or something like that? That would work as well

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**Author:** ![JackDevine](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/jackdevine/32/1048_2.png) [@JackDevine](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/JackDevine)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2019, 11:41pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/4 "2019-10-27T23:41:02Z")

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I don’t have Julia on my current computer, so I cant test anything for you. However, I think that the GIFs in this blog should help you:

> **[DiffEqFlux.jl – A Julia Library for Neural Differential Equations](https://julialang.org/blog/2019/01/fluxdiffeq/)**
>
> DiffEqFlux.jl – A Julia Library for Neural Differential Equations...

Basically, you have to replace `update display` in your psuedo code with `display(scatter(data))`. If latency is a problem and you are running out of RAM, then you could consider not displaying every step of your simulation while you are in the development phase. Flux has the `throttle` functionality, however, you should be able to get something fairly similar in your own code.

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**Author:** ![anon92994695](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ce7236/32.png) [@anon92994695](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/anon92994695)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2019, 11:46pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/5 "2019-10-27T23:46:53Z")

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when you do this

```julia
data = randn(100)
a = scatter( data )
for i in 1:10
    #update data
    data = randn(100)
    display(scatter(data))
    #update display
    sleep(0.1)
end

```

in Juno it makes a new plot each iteration(that’s what kills my memory).

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**Author:** ![anon92994695](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ce7236/32.png) [@anon92994695](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/anon92994695)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 12:11am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/7 "2019-10-28T00:11:01Z")

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Okay I got the behaviour I wanted!

Had to use Interact.jl and Observables… Kind of lateral thinking, but it works really nicely!

```nohighlight
using Interact, Plots
plt_obs = Observable{Any}(scatter(data))
data_obs = Observable{Any}(data)

map!(t -> scatter(t), plt_obs, data_obs)

ui = dom"div"( plt_obs )

for i in 1:10
    data_obs[] = randn(100)
    sleep(0.4)
end

```

I’d still like to see other solutions, so please fire away, or offer suggestions

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**Author:** ![baggepinnen](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/baggepinnen/32/693_2.png) [@baggepinnen](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/baggepinnen)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 1:25am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/8 "2019-10-28T01:25:06Z")

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Plotly from Plots gives me an interactive 3d plot in atom

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**Author:** ![Raf](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/raf/32/3383_2.png) [@Raf](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Raf)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 6:13am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/9 "2019-10-28T06:13:23Z")

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Hah that’s actually what I was going to suggest. We run a lot of live simulations in the atom plot window.

You shouldn’t need Interact.jl, just Observables.jl and WebIO.jl.

The good thing is that should also work in jupyter, a web page or an electron window without changes (which is also what we do).

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**Author:** ![pfitzseb](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/pfitzseb/32/45566_2.png) [@pfitzseb](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/pfitzseb)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 8:30am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/10 "2019-10-28T08:30:52Z")

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Using Observables + WebIO is the correct solution for this, yes.

> that’s what kills my memory

Is it the Atom process taking up too much memory? I thought I had implement a limit on how many plots are kept in memory, but maybe I forgot about that.

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**Author:** ![anon92994695](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ce7236/32.png) [@anon92994695](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/anon92994695)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 9:25am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/11 "2019-10-28T09:25:43Z")

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Its possible there is a plot number limit and the problem was just me polling new plots too quickly. Or maybe my settings were set to be too demanding - I’m not sure. The use case involves potentially 10’s of thousands of points being plotted and updated at about 1/100th the speed of real life. So it’s pretty demanding.

Sounds like I’ve stumbled on a good enough solution here I appreciate everyones input.

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**Author:** ![pfitzseb](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/pfitzseb/32/45566_2.png) [@pfitzseb](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/pfitzseb)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 10:04am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/12 "2019-10-28T10:04:17Z")

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Turns out I did indeed forget to implement that. Fixed with  
[https://github.com/JunoLab/atom-ink/pull/238](https://github.com/JunoLab/atom-ink/pull/238)  
though.

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**Author:** ![williamjsdavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/9fc348/32.png) [@williamjsdavis](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/williamjsdavis)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2020, 12:10am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/current-state-of-live-plots-in-atom-juno/30379/13 "2020-04-04T00:10:30Z")

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Thank you for posting this. This solution was useful to me so I generalised it into a package: [SmoothLivePlot.jl](https://github.com/williamjsdavis/SmoothLivePlot.jl). Hope it can be useful for other people too.