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Altair is incredible until you realise your plots are bigger than your data. It's annoying, but overall still very good.

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This is something we are painfully aware of and have started to work on. For a start, see Jake's work on https://pypi.org/project/altair-data-server/.

Can you speak more about this? Are you saying that Altair's speed scales poorly with dataset size?

It throws an error if you try to plot more than 5000 datapoints by default, internally altair produces a JSON representation (vega-lite) that is larger than the data you plot (because it contains the data you plot, plus formatting information). If you save this output, for example in an ipython notebook, it gets phat pretty quickly.

Altair is still great though, but this issue makes it occasionally annoying.

Just in case, you can plot datasets larger than 5000. A quick fix is using "alt.data_transformers.enable('json')"

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