I am having issues with small figures that I am trying to generate. Here is a minimal working example that demonstrates the issue:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(0.5,0.5))
plt.savefig('small.png',dpi = 100)

which yields a file small.png with dimensions 291 x 50 (wxh) so the height is being properly handled, but the width is not. This seems to be a bug. I seem to recall having similar issues with large figures, I can post another mwe for large figsize too.