[FIXED] IPython console in spyder extremely slow in Anaconda

Issue

I'm trying Anaconda/Spyder after using the standard python installation/IDLE for several years. The console (and variable explorer) becomes progressively slower during each work session, with every script and interactive command that I run. Eventually it takes minutes to get a response to simple commands like print, and then it stops responding completely and I shut it down. It's pretty disruptive to my work.

Mac OSX 10.13.6

conda version : 4.5.11
conda-build version : 3.15.1
python version : 3.7.0.final.0

qt 5.9.6
spyder 3.3.1 
ipython 7.1.1

I do use matplotlib frequently. Whenever possible I use plt.ioff() at the beginning of a script and/or plt.close('all') at the end. Turning off matplotlib support completely in preferences doesn't help and it's not a permanent fix anyway. Python is not using anywhere near all my CPU or RAM.

Solution

So this is not a totally satisfying solution but it seems to be a reasonable temporary fix. If you downgrade your spyder version to 3.1.X you will be able to use the python console rather than the Ipython console, and this seems to work for me. To do this just run:

conda install spyder=3.1

in the terminal while your environment of choice is active. This is not ideal, because the developers removed the python console for a specific reason as mentioned in this question, How to add python console in spyder. Additionally downgrading this much may have unforeseen effects on other packages your code uses and may cause other issues but so far this is the only solution I was able to come up with.

Answered By - JJR4