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?
Just to add on, colab is weird and not performant, this PR outlines our attempts to get jupyter-rfb working on colab: https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb/pull/77