RichTextBox UI responsiveness

[Licenses]

I'm having some issues with the UI responsiveness of the RichTextBox when typing text, it responds rather slow.
I then checked the demo on this site, to see if it had something to do with my code, but the issue is the same in the demo.

Is this something that is going to be fixed/improved in future releases? 

[Mike]

Hi Sodi We,

We are constantly working on improving the performance of RadRichTextBox. One of our main goals is to be able to have smooth experience even with large documents. On the other hand, we are also rapidly adding many more features our customers requested and this sometimes comes with a little performance penalty. We will though profile the components and further optimize the overall performance in the next versions.

In your particular case, can you please specify what kind of document you are loading in RadRichTextBox and how many pages there are when you experience the slow response? We would also appreciate if you can tell us the metrics of the PC you are using to perform editing.

Sincerely yours,
Mike
the Telerik team

[Licenses]

maybe the easiest scenario is typing in some text in the demo on this site. It doesn't feel smooth on this machine, it feels the typing has a slight delay before being output to the screen.

The pc I tested it on is a Hp laptop
Intel Core2 T7600 @2.33GHz
4Gb RAM
64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise
7200 rpm HD
20 MBits broadband connection

[Mike]

Hi Sodi We,

Thank you for getting back to us. We will push some more in this direction and try to optimize the overall performance in the next versions. Let us know if we can help further.

Kind regards,
Mike
the Telerik team

[Thomas Oates]

Any update on this?
We are not loading any document just have the following in the xaml and it takes 2+ seconds to load the view.

<telerik:RadRichTextBox x:Name="Editor"

Background="White"

HorizontalAlignment="Left"

Width="600"

Height="100"

Margin="8,0,8,0">

</telerik:RadRichTextBox>

[Mike]

Hello Bryan Amaral,

Can you please elaborate a bit more on this issue? We did a very simple test of loading time of RadRichTextBox and it is no more than 0.12 secs the first time it loads and 0.001 secs about each new instance after that. Please find the test application attached.

For your information, the previous messages in the thread concern the responsiveness of RadRichTextBox related to speed of typing text and as we promised in Q3 text input performance is much better and will be even more optimized in the the upcomming Q3 Sp1.

Kind regards,
Mike
the Telerik team

[Trude]

I too find the load time on the richtextbox a tad slow. I ran your project on my development machine (it got 8 gigs of RAM, quad-core 3.2 GHz, only VS2010 was running) - it's much slower here - around 0.5 seconds on first load and < 0.1 seconds on subsequent loads. In my real project where I use the ribbon, rulers etc. the load time is nearly 1 second!

1. Is there a way to speed this up? 0.1 seconds on first load in your environment sounds good.
2. I thought about making a splash screen/dialoge while it loads; what's the best approach for this?

[Trude]

I updated the RichTextBox.Xaml file in the project to this:

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
    <Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
        <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
        <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
    </Grid.RowDefinitions>
    <telerik:RadRichTextBoxRibbonUI DataContext="{Binding ElementName=radRichTextBox1}" Name="RadRichTextBoxRibbonUI1"/>
    <telerik:DocumentRuler Grid.Row="1" AssociatedRichTextBox="{Binding ElementName=radRichTextBox1, Mode=OneTime}"/>
    <telerik:RadRichTextBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="12,12,0,0" Name="radRichTextBox1" VerticalAlignment="Top" BorderBrush="SlateBlue" Grid.Row="1" BorderThickness="1" Height="276" Width="376" />
    <telerik:RadRichTextBoxStatusBar Grid.Row="2" AssociatedRichTextBox="{Binding ElementName=radRichTextBox1, Mode=OneTime}"/>
</Grid>

Launch time on my dev-box varies from 0.8 to 1.5 seconds (even with debugger off).

[Alex]

Hi Jorn,

There is indeed some performance hit when RibbonUI, StatusBar and Ruler controls are used. The problem is that there are some initializations that take place the first time the controls are loaded. Any subsequent loads of the controls are much faster. 

We are currently looking for ways to reduce the initial load time of the RadRichTextBox. Also the RadRibbon (on which the RadRibbonBar is based) will be heavily refactored for the next release which will probably speed things up even more.

If you have any other questions, do not hesitate to contact us again.

Best wishes,
Alex
the Telerik team

[Mike]

Has this problem been addressed?  We are having issues with this currently, with it taking up to 4 full seconds to load in some instances.  Only on the first load, as Alex pointed out, but still.  We are hoping to use this control heavily, and a 4 second load is terrible.  We are using the RadRibbonBar and RadRichTextBox.  Is there anything I can do to improve this?

[Stephen]

I can accept the initial load up times particularly with a busy ribbon bar control, but what I've struggled with is the performance of the control when spell checking is turned on.  I know there is an option to turn it off in code and the UI but if you are going to focus your performance tweaks anywhere I personally would really like it to be in this area. 

Lexical parsing is no easy thing so I'm not surprised at the performance issues, but clients on particularly low end machines can struggle to have a responsive experience when spell checking is turned on.  (And this isn't on what I would consider low end machines)

Thanks,

Stephen

[Vesko]

Hi Stephen,

We are always glad to have use cases helping us to improve the performance of you product.
If you can take a look at the demo on our web site:
http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#RichTextBox/MSWord
the performance does not seem affected so noticeable when spell-checking is toggled. This is because we designed RadRichTextBox to spell-check only the words visible on the screen.

That's why we believe the performance problem you experience might be related to the specific case. It will be very helpful if you open a support ticket and send us an example test scenario or at least document in which you experience the performance problem. We will look deeply in it and see whether and how the performance could be improved.

All the best,
Vesko
the Telerik team

[swati]

Hi,

I'm using RadRichTextBox bounded with datatable. When I try to change font or delete some characters, it takes too long to load. Please provide some way to improve performance when these small tasks are carried out.

Thanks
Swati