How to copy Figure or Trace object? Deepcopy no longer working

📊 Plotly Python
1

I’m trying to create a copy for caching purposes, so I can load and make slight modifications to some traces without generating a new Figure which would take a lot of time in my Dash app.

Deepcopy used to be implemented for Figure, but it was removed somewhere along the way with recent updates. Regenerating from figure.to_dict() is unfortunately way too slow vs my prior use of deepcopy. A simple copy does not replicate the traces, instead only creating pointers.

Any suggestions? Creating copies of Traces seems to be the bottleneck here

2

Hi @jab551,

I just created a performance issue that I think covers this usecase: https://github.com/plotly/plotly.py/issues/1078

With this optimization you would be able to write:

fig2 = go.Figure(fig1)

And it would perform the deep copy underneath and not re-trigger the validation of all of the properties in fig1, which I believe is what’s slowing things down right now.

At this point, I think your only real option is to use raw dictionaries (rather that graph objects) for performance critical code.

1 Like
3

Thanks @jmmease for creating this issue. Using raw dicts for now. The plotting function itself triggers validation though which may possibly slow down this method when passing in a dict.

4

Are you talking about the plot/iplot plotting functions? These should have a validate=False option that will bypass validation.
-Jon

5

Ah, that is great. Thanks Jon!

Do you know whether dcc.Graph or other components would perform any type of validation? (did not look like it when perusing the Python code)

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I’m not certain, but I don’t think dcc.Graph performs and validation if you pass in a dict.