Performant graph plotting and benchmarking

[filchristou]

I think it's time to start looking at the performance of GraphMakie.jl
I guess this mostly means rewriting most of the code to be type stable..
To do such a thing, I suggest that we first setup a benchmarking toolchain, to track improvements.

Such advancements will be very useful for interactions, animations, and big graphs.
In my use case now, I have a graph with 8814 nodes and 48583 edges.
The default plot requires 219.085997 seconds (1.97 M allocations: 122.813 MiB, 0.03% gc time) in my machine.
I am not sure how much better this can get..but it will be exciting to find out!

[hexaeder]

Wow thats a long waiting time... As a first step it might be interesting to sprinkle a few TimerOutputs.jl annotations in the recipe to get an idea of how much time is spent within GraphMakie and how much time is spent in the linesegments and scatter calls.

[SimonDanisch]

Or benchmark the layouting algorithm directly? I doubt that the plotting will be the bottleneck here ....

[hexaeder]

Also, during plotting the recipe code is always run twice (not exactly sure why though). Would be nice to somehow detect the first run and skip the layout algo there to not run an expensive layout twice. Simon do you have any idea on how to detect that?

[SimonDanisch]

Uh, we should just fix it in Makie...
The user can already avoid that by calling plot(...; axis=(type=Axis;)) or whatever axis type you want.
Right now we need to plot it one time to figure out the axis type :D But, we do hope to remove this in the next breaking release