Spyder stops executing commands if Variable explorer shows complicated objects

[talkaminker]

Description

I often found that spyder sometimes becomes unusable because some complicated object is present in the variable explorer
even running 1+1 just hangs and takes ages to be executed
Here is a working example

run the following code:

from collections import defaultdict
import numpy as np
bug = defaultdict(list)
for i in range(50000):
    a = {j:np.random.rand(10) for j in range(10)}
    bug[i] = a

Now running even the simplest stuff in the ipython console is unbearably slow.
changing bug to be of type dict solves it

Please provide any additional information below
I dont have autorefresh enabled (I didn't change any options in th Varibale explorer)

My guess is that the code that creates the string representation for variable explorer doesn't have an optimization for very large defaultdict.
This makes defaultdict unusable for me.

Version and main components

• Spyder Version: 3.1.3
• Python Version: 2.7.12
• Qt Versions: 5.6.2, PyQt5 5.6 on Linux

Dependencies

pyflakes >=0.5.0 :  1.3.0 (OK)
pep8 >=0.6       :  1.7.0 (OK)
pygments >=2.0   :  2.1.3 (OK)
qtconsole >=4.2.0:  4.2.1 (OK)
nbconvert >=4.0  :  4.2.0 (OK)
pandas >=0.13.1  :  0.19.2 (OK)
numpy >=1.7      :  1.11.2 (OK)
sphinx >=0.6.6   :  1.4.6 (OK)
rope >=0.9.4     :  0.9.4 (OK)
jedi =0.9.0      :  0.9.0 (OK)
psutil >=0.3     :  4.3.1 (OK)
matplotlib >=1.0 :  1.5.3 (OK)
sympy >=0.7.3    :  1.0 (OK)
pylint >=0.25    :  1.5.4 (OK)

[ccordoba12]

Thanks for the report and for the reproducible example. We'll take a look at this problem for Spyder 3.2