# Horrendous start-up time. julia or plots or both?

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/horrendous-start-up-time-julia-or-plots-or-both/3489
**Category:** General Usage
**Created:** [May 3, 2017, 4:02am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/horrendous-start-up-time-julia-or-plots-or-both/3489 "2017-05-03T04:02:55Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![purplishrock](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/purplishrock/32/13451_2.png) [@purplishrock](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/purplishrock)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2017, 4:02am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/horrendous-start-up-time-julia-or-plots-or-both/3489/1 "2017-05-03T04:02:55Z")

</div>

```julia
using Plots

x=1:100
y=[i*i for i in x]

plot(x,y)
gui()

```

real 0m22.690s  
user 0m20.084s  
sys 0m1.456s

There’s about 1.5s in there for me to close the plot window.

This is clearly broken behavior. Can somebody suggest what’s going on ?

And if this is a Plots problem, can someone point me to an alternative ?

Thanks

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![ChrisRackauckas](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/chrisrackauckas/32/77_2.png) [@ChrisRackauckas](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ChrisRackauckas)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2017, 4:46am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/horrendous-start-up-time-julia-or-plots-or-both/3489/2 "2017-05-03T04:46:09Z")

</div>

Plots does lazy loading of the backends. A simpler recreation is

```julia
using Plots
plotly() # or whatever backend you're using

```

Generally this doesn’t matter unless you’re opening and closing new sessions often. But yes, Plots.jl has a plan for how to get rid of this in the works. This has to do with conditional dependencies which are getting a massive overhaul pre-1.0.

Gadfly has a startup time issue, so if this is what you’re looking to avoid I would avoid that too. Direct usage of PyPlot, Plotly, or GR are probably your best bets for now if you need to cut the startup times.