Thanks. Yeah I've been baffled as to why just interactive Matplotlib with a Colab kernel is so slow. The Colab CPU is fast (enough), the network is fast, I haven't been able to figure out where the bottleneck is either.
I just remembered, I think there is something weird with Google's servers or the network because performance was very poor even with a custom Google Cloud instance running jupyterlab, see this: https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb/issues/95#issuecomment-...
Is google colab slower than an equivalently powerful kernel running on a remote jupyter kernel? Are you running into network problems, or is it something specific to colab?
I believe the performance is pretty decent, especially if you run the kernel locally
Their docs also cover this as mentioned by @clewis7 below: https://www.fastplotlib.org/ver/dev/user_guide/faq.html#what...