Interesting performance slowdown observed for small interactive tasks

[astrojuanlu]

This is a minor observation and I'm not even sure it's Vaex fault so I'm opening it as a discussion.

I observed that it takes almost 7 seconds on my environment to display a simple .head(10) of a dataset (see "last executed" info below the cell):

However, looking into what _repr_html_ does, I can't easily explain why calling it directly is twice as fast, down to ~3.5 seconds (notice the cell count, I restarted the kernel to avoid any sort of caching):

I initially thought this could be due to Orchest jupyter-enterprise-gateway, but I can reproduce the same results locally: 2 seconds for normal df.head(10), 1 second for a "manual" display, both on JupyterLab and classic Notebook:

I can't reproduce these differences on an IPython console. Just food for thought - maybe I'm missing something super obvious here, I'd be happy to stand corrected.

Edit: Final clarification, these performance differences don't seem to appear with plain pandas: