hist breaks when range of input data is very large

When hist is given a large range of values and the freedman bin method is chosen memory use grows rapidly, (15GB when I killed the kernel after a few minutes), CPU usage jumps to 100% and the histogram is never plotted even if the number of data points is small.

This case below reproduces the behavior on my computer; I don’t think there is anything special about the set of numbers below, just that the range needs to be large. Note that only 10 points need to be histogrammed.

import numpy as np

from astropy.visualization import hist

data = [ 9.99999914e+05, -8.31312483e-03,  6.52755852e-02,  1.43104653e-03,
             -2.26311017e-02,  2.82660007e-03,  1.80307521e-02,  9.26294279e-03,
             5.06606026e-02,  2.05418011e-03]
hist(data, bins='freedman')

I’ve seen this issue in both astropy 2.0.8 and 3.0.4 both in Python 3.6.

[mwcraig]

Oops, thanks for letting me know. Accidentally tagged the wrong sub package initially too 🙄

[bsipocz]

@abhinuvpitale - The bins are computed by astropy and passed as those large arrays to mpl.