title: Which would be faster
body: <p>I have a pipe to gnuplot in c that I am passing 100,000 points as inline data. I need to plot multiple lines from this data set. The problem is that Gnuplot forgets about the inline data once it plots a single line. Now I could write this data to a file on the disk and then I can tell Gnuplot to plot all lines from the file, or alternativly I could write all the points to an array and then create multiple inline entries via the pipe to gnuplot which would use only memory, I assume, and won't need to touch the disk at all. I don't know whether it would be faster if I wrote the 100,00 to disk once or save the 100,000 in an array and then pass them to Gnuplot via the pipe using only memory, which however I would have to repeat for each line (probably 10 lines at most), so I would have to copy maybe 500,000 points between memory locations, rather than 100,000 to disk. Any opinions would be appreciated. </p>