Paraview UI hangs/glitches out with 10 million point 2D scatter plot

Hi there, I’ve stumbled virtually upon @mwestphal and he said this might be worth sending a message here about it, so here it is.

The exact data set and use case are described at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5854515/interactive-large-plot-with-20-million-sample-points-and-gigabytes-of-data/55967461#55967461

Basically I want to plot 10 million points and select some outliers with the mouse to see their other dimensions, this generates the CSV test data:

i=0;
while [ "$i" -lt 10000000 ]; do
  echo "$i,$((2 * i)),$((4 * i))"; i=$((i + 1));
done > 10m1.csv
echo 5000000,20000000,-1 >> 10m1.csv

I’m afraid Paraview 5.9.0 couldn’t handle that number of points on my testing, the UI hang/glitched out, I’m not sure which. 32GB RAM 8 core CPU.

In any case, I was glad to play with Paraview and other interactive plotting software for the first time, it does look really cool.

Also keep in mind that I was just Googling for all possible plotters to see if any solved my use case, and I understand that this might not be the use case it was designed for/I’m using it wrong. But maybe it is also value in seeing the impressions of a newbie.

I had only used gnuplot/matplotlib previously, but they didn’t handle this many points for interactive purposes.

In the end I found Vaex handled this use case amazingly even for 1B points.

Cheers and thanks for maintaining ParaView!

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I’d suggest reading the stack overflow post from @cirosantilli, It is very informative and true research work.

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