[FIXED] TimeoutError: Lock error: Matplotlib failed to acquire the following lock file

Issue

I obtain the error:

TimeoutError: Lock error: Matplotlib failed to acquire the following lock file

when I remove the comment # before the command for setting the font. Why? How to correct that, please?

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

params = {'text.usetex' : True,
          'font.size' : 8,
          'font.family' : 'lmodern'
          }
#plt.rcParams.update(params)

fig, ((ax01, ax02, ax03, ax0), (ax1, ax2, ax3, ax4), (ax5, ax6, ax7, ax8), (ax9, ax10, ax11, ax12)) = plt.subplots(nrows=4, ncols=4, figsize=(12,7))



for ax in [ax1, ax2, ax3, ax4, ax5, ax6, ax7, ax8, ax9, ax10, ax11, ax12]: 
    ax.set_xlim(0,1000) 
    ax.ticklabel_format(useOffset=False)

plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Solution

Putting my comment into an answer: it seems like you need to delete your matplotlib cache folder. It can be done within Python with:

import pathlib
import matplotlib as mpl

pathlib.Path.rmdir( mpl.get_cachedir())

And, by the way, you can tidy your axes definition and iteration:

fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=4, ncols=4, figsize=(12,7))


for ax in axes.ravel(): 
    ax.set_xlim(0,1000) 
    ax.ticklabel_format(useOffset=False)

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