matplotlib.pyplot will not forget previous plots - how can I flush/refresh?

I discovered that this behaviour only occurs after running a particular script, similar to the one in the question. I have no idea why it occurs.

It works (refreshes the graphs) if I put

plt.clf()
plt.cla()
plt.close()

after every plt.show()

I would rather use plt.clf() after every plt.show() to just clear the current figure instead of closing and reopening it, keeping the window size and giving you a better performance and much better memory usage.

Similarly, you could do plt.cla() to just clear the current axes.

To clear a specific axes, useful when you have multiple axes within one figure, you could do for example:

fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2)

axes[0, 1].clear()