Problem

As part ofthis discussion in an issue in themplcairo project, it became apparent that there is no "official", detailed guide on how to optimize animations withmatploblib for speed.

I am developing alibrary for compositing & rendering animations, which can usematplotlib 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 amtrying to provide abrief introduction into optimizing the usage ofmatplotlib for speed.

From experience I know that there are many approaches for this. The better you understandmatplotlib 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 mentionssome relevant concepts here and there.

Suggested Improvement

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