Comments on: Improving graphics interactivity

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 11:01:17 +0000

drawnow is the entry function to Matlab graphics updates, which chains numerous internal drawing/painting calls, as well as associated callbacks (internal and user-defined). Memory leaks are possible, but the effect you see could also be attributed to other causes, such as newly-created/rendered graphics/GUI components that remain visible (i.e., the memory will remain used as long as the objects are displayed/alive). It’s too bad that Matlab gives users no insight into the memory and CPU aspects of drawnow, but that’s the way it is.

Going forward, please use the new variant of this site (https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles or https://undocumentedmatlab.com) – not https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog_old which is deprecated and is no longer maintained.

By: Ondrej

Ondrej — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 10:40:20 +0000

Hi Yair,
I have a slightly off-topic question. I am using Matlab 2017a and when using drawnow to refresh the graphics I noticed in the profiler (with -memory option on) this:
Code Calls TotalTime AllocatedMemory FreedMemory PeakMemory
drawnow |4| 1.371s | 86955.17 Kb | 80.33 Kb | 79462.42 Kb

Does it mean that drawnow has a memory leak? Or that’s how Matlab preallocates the memory?
Thanks.

By: Collin

Collin — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:35:09 +0000

A potential lightweight alternative to the standard axes toolbar is the FloatingPalette

hFTB = controllib.plot.internal.FloatingPalette(FigureHandle, ButtonList)

It’s not as pretty as the standard axes toolbar and has less button options but does not fade, works best for single axes figures.

You need to set the standard toolbar invisible or set it to empty before creating the floating palette.

hAxes.Toolbar.Visible = 'off';  % or:
hAxes.Toolbar = [];

By: Komutan Logar

Komutan Logar — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 12:49:49 +0000

Thank you very much. I’m using dynamic plotting, moving particles, only one figure created as a digraph. The performance has slightly improved and I also didn’t need the toolbox and interactions(I removed them all) anyway. I would like to ask if it makes any difference if I remove the toolbox and interactions in the AxesCreationFcn or after the figure is created by using ax = gca; ax.Interactions = []; ?

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 16:00:32 +0000

@Jeremiah – perhaps the default interactions are implemented only as the last step in the axes creation sequence, after the user-specified AxesCreationFcn callback has already executed.

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:26:07 +0000

I tried to run your function during a figure(…) creation and it removes the axes toolbar but it does not change the interactions. Those only work once the axes is already created and then I change them. But I’d like to have this automated, even in the startup.m script. Can you think of why the toolbar portion works but the interactions don’t while used as a defaultAxesCreationFcn ?

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 24 May 2019 12:26:02 +0000

I’d love to be able to customize the appearance of the axes toolbar rather than replacing it. Frustratingly my attempts have led to not very much success, I can move it from it’s current location fairly easily and resize it once it’s visible, but the size is reset every time the menu appears. I wonder if anyone else has had any success?

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Tue, 21 May 2019 08:07:31 +0000

@Andreas – as far as I could see there is no change in R2019a.

By: Andreas

Andreas — Tue, 21 May 2019 07:23:03 +0000

Great article.

Do you know if something changed with R2019a? Is MathWorks working on this new “feature” and improving it?