spyder: Variable explorer is very slow

The variable explorer in Spyder 5.1.1 performs very slowly. Consider the following example:

my_list = []

for i in range(300):
    # already slow
    # my_list.append(i)

    # more complex list --> even slower variable explorer
    a = (i, (2*i, 3*i, 4*i))
    my_list.append(a)

The list my_list appears correctly in the variable explorer. But it is almost impossible to inspect the list in the variable explorer, the respective dialog freezes constantly. Problems can be observed already for the simple test case and are more severe for the complex list. I observed this behavior on two different computers with fresh installations. Inspecting the same list in Spyder 3.3.6 is no problem.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 3 years ago
Comments: 21 (17 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@ccordoba12 @dalthviz Thanks for investigating this issue. As suggested, I tried the following commands to install Spyder:

conda create -n py37 python=3.7
conda activate py37
conda install -c conda-forge matplotlib numpy pandas
conda install spyder

As expected, this improved the performance significantly. The variable explorer still seems to be a little bit slower than it was in Spyder 3, but is now much faster than before.

andprosoft on Aug 24, 2021

Something like retrying to import the modules each time a GUI update is being done?

Yeah, it could be something like that. I’ll check to see if I can fix it in 5.1.2.

In addition, after uninstalling Pandas, Numpy and Scipy from my environment, I can also reproduce this problem on Linux.

ccordoba12 on Aug 24, 2021

Ok, that’s great feedback @dalthviz! It probably means that this problem is related to the changes I did in PR #15857.

ccordoba12 on Aug 24, 2021

@dalthviz, could you check if you get the same behavior on Windows?

ccordoba12 on Aug 23, 2021