Question

Here is a simple plot:

1) How to disable the ticks?
2) How to reduce their number?

Here is a sample code:

from pylab import *
import numpy as np

x = [5e-05, 5e-06, 5e-07, 5e-08, 5e-09, 5e-10]
y = [-13, 14, 100, 120, 105, 93]

def myfunc(x,p):
    sl,yt,yb,ec=p    
    y = yb + (yt-yb)/(1+np.power(10, sl*(np.log10(x)-np.log10(ec))))
    return y

xp = np.power(10, np.linspace(np.log10(min(x)/10), np.log10(max(x)*10), 100))

pxp=myfunc(xp, [1,100,0,1e-6])
subplot(111,axisbg="#dfdfdf")
plt.plot(x, y, '.', xp, pxp, 'g-', linewidth=1)   
plt.xscale('log')

plt.grid(True,ls="-", linewidth=0.4, color="#ffffff", alpha=0.5)


plt.draw()
plt.show()

Which produces:

Answer 1

plt.minorticks_off()

Turns em off!

To change the number of them/position them, you can use the subsx parameter. like this:

plt.xscale('log', subsx=[2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9])

From the docs:

subsx/subsy: Where to place the subticks between each major tick.
Should be a sequence of integers. For example, in a log10 scale: [2,
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

will place 8 logarithmically spaced minor ticks between each major
tick.