Best practice for performance

[Erik]

When I am moving between pages in my application, there is a noticeable delay between transitions. The animations occur fine, but I get a long pause on the blank/black screen between the animations. What should I look at to try and make transitions snappier or quicker?

[Valentin.Stoychev]

Hi,

We are aware of this glitch. It happens when you make navigation between heavy pages. Unfortunately we do not have a cure for this at the moment. We will research how to can be accomplished for the future.

On trick that you can do is to set a background to the Application frame - then you will see no black screen during the transitions. Please note that this may impact the design of the app and possibly the performance (if you do not remove the background from your existing pages).

Please let us know if you need more help on this.

All the best,
Valentin.Stoychev
the Telerik team

[Erik]

This helped, but there is still some lag between the two pages.

I read some blog about how the base control draws the background at every frame which can impact the performance, so making it transparent helps it since it's not drawing the background ever. Basically if you had dark theme, you were drawing black on black. Does this make sense?

RootFrame = new RadPhoneApplicationFrame {Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Transparent)};

[Valentin.Stoychev]

Hi,

By default the background of the RadPhoneApplicationFrame is transparent, so this should not be an issue in this case.

Kind regards, Valentin.Stoychev
the Telerik team

[Erik]

Oh well, I'll keep my eye open for any ideas then. Thanks!

[Brian]

Hello,

I'm having this same performance issue. The lag happens the first time you navigate to the page but does not on the next navigation event.

 What I have found is that if I remove the Telerik controls from the page I'm navigating to and replace them with the MS toolkit equivalents, the performance issue is solved. I'm a big fan of Telerik's controls so I hate doing this. However, the lag is so bad it creates a bad user experience. I hope your engineers can solve this issue quickly.

Thank you,
Brian

[Deyan]

Hello Brian,

Thanks for writing and for the further details.

As my colleague Valentin said, we are in the process of investigating possibilities for optimization here and we hope that we will be able to ship an upgraded version of RadPhoneApplicationFrame soon that will solve the undesired behavior.

We will keep you posted on this thread when further details are available.

Do not hesitate to get back to us in case you have further questions or need assistance.

Kind regards,
Deyan
the Telerik team

[Zik]

I am seeing this as well.  I have one page that has a couple of Telerik controls (toggle switch, time picker, modal window) plus a user control that contains a number of toggle switches and input boxes.  I added a bunch of timestamp logging, which does slow things down a bit (plus it's a debug build), but here are the numbers:

DetailsPage created at 22:28:57.39200
SettingsView created at 22:28:58.37000
ListPage OnNavigatedFrom at 22:28:58.54500
DetailsPage OnNavigatedTo at 22:28:58.55600
ListPage Unloaded at 22:28:58.60500
DetailsPage Loaded at 22:28:59.43200, took 00:00:00.8760000 (00:00:02.0400000 total)
SettingsView Loaded at 22:28:59.49700, took 00:00:01.1270000

Going from the ListPage to the DetailsPage, and the DetailsPage contains the user control SettingsView.  "Created at" is when the page's constructor is being called.  "Loaded" is the Loaded event.  The DetailsPage is showing two TimeSpans, the first is between the OnNavigatedTo and Loaded, the second is between the constructor and Loaded.  The SettingsView doesn't have an OnNavigatedTo (being a user control) so that TimeSpan is the time between the constructor and Loaded.  The one second delay between the DetailsPage and SettingsView constructor is very interesting - DetailPage's constructor doesn't do much, but I tried commenting everything out anyway and it didn't make a difference.

I should note this is only apparent when running on an actual device (an HTC Trophy, in my case).  When run in the emulator it's very fast (the continuum transition from the ListPage does stutter but the DetailsPage loads very quickly after that).

Thanks,
-Steve

[Valentin.Stoychev]

Hi Stephen,

Thank you for sending these datails. Can you please share the project where this is experienced?

Regards, Valentin.Stoychev
the Telerik team

[Zik]

Sure thing. Let me streamline things and I'll open a ticket and send it over.

[Jon]

Seems this is still an issue?

[Deyan]

Hi Jon,

Can you please share with us details on your scenario?

When using third-party control a delay is expectable since custom styles and assemblies are loaded into the application domain. This takes tame and can be overcome using some trickery but in order to be able to help we need some context.

Thanks for your time.

Greetings,
Deyan
the Telerik team

[Jon]

Hi Deyan

I was hoping to be able to make a slide transition between pages where the pages slided simultaniously and edge-to-edge, with no space between them and no delay. But even though I set PlayMode to Simultaneously, there was still a gap and a delay between the pages. Without transitions between the pages, the new page appear immediately, so I do not think the delay is due to rendering of the new page.

Anyway, I decided to implement a different kind of transition between the pages to be able to get on.

Regards
Jon

[Deyan]

Hi Jon,

Thanks for getting back to me

We will consider this thread closed for now.

Let us know in case you have further questions or need assistance.

Kind regards,
Deyan
the Telerik team