300 pages report takes ~2 minutes to generate

[Mihai Dinculescu]

Hello

I have this report that has around 300 pages. Exporting it to CSV takes about 20 seconds and that's ok. But exporting it to PDF or simply displaying it takes around 2 minutes and this seems unacceptable for my client.

Is there any way to speed this up ?

[David Billingham]

The Q2 release (released today) is supposed to provide a general performance increase, however based on a quick test I don't see any major difference. Just run a 46 page reports with Q1 and Q2 and both took 25 seconds.

I have asked about this kind of performance before - but so far nothing has changed. Luckily my customers don't seem to run huge reports but I think the current performance on PDF is poor.

Previous advice I've had is to avoid adding page numbers as that causes a performance hit. But on a 300 page report you probably do want those in!

[Massimiliano Bassili]

David, there is nowhere in the official statements mentioning that the release provides incredible general performance increase. I guess you're judging from the last point in What's new section which does not give any concrete numbers i.e. if the increase is 3% what would that amount for 25 seconds? The major improvements are listed in the first 3 points. Also according to the http://www.telerik.com/help/reporting/designing-performance.html article, it is the PageCount causing the problem and not the PageNumber, so go ahead and apply numbers in your report.

Mihai, upgrade to Q2 if you haven't and see whether the improvements make difference for your reports.

Cheers!

[David Billingham]

I stand corrected - it was indeed the page count not the page numbers that cause a performance hit - I tend to think of the 2 things together as would like to be able to put "Page x of y" on all my reports.

In the Q2 release notes it says that Q2 provides:

"Reduced memory footprint and increased speed of processing and rendering of the reports in general"

I haven't had the time to check the memory foot print point but was hoping that the second point would produce quicker rendering in PDF. I've yet to detect that but perhaps I am looking in the wrong place.

Can anyone provide an explanation of the PDF rendering performance?

[Steve]

Hi David,

Masimiliano is right in his guess - the general improvement in processing and rendering is not that huge, so it is quite possible you would not notice major difference in quickly rendered reports. However the difference when using the report viewers should be noticeable. We're yet to optimize the rendering extensions, PDF included.

Greetings,
Steve
the Telerik team

[David Billingham]

Hi Steve

Thanks for your response and explanation.

Do you know if optimization of the rendering extensions is going to happen in the near future?

Generally I am really happy with the product, however the rendering speed of PDFs is a major concern. If my customers ran old reports and compared them to similar reports re-written with Telerik reporting I would have some awkward questions to answer as the Telerik reports are 50%+ slower.

I suspect an increase in performance in this area would make quite a few people very happy.

Cheers

David

[Steve]

Hello David,

Yes, we plan to optimize the rendering extensions for subsequent versions and that is what I meant with my last sentence from previous reply.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Rakesh]

Let me explain my scenarios:

1. Created report. Data store contains images in columns.
2. It contains 217 rows with 37 images. Database returns it in less than one seconds.
3. On loading in browser it taken around 150 seconds

Same data with other controls:
Aspose: 45 seconds. Not considering because desginer is not provided
Reporting Services: 7 seconds. Not considering due to security risk over internet
SyncFuction: 35 seconds. Not considering for same reason as Aspose.

I like telerik controls and your support also. Performance for me is a major concern, because if you do samething with other tools they are lot quicker than telerik reporting.

[Peter]

Hello Rakesh,

We will need more information about your configuration and the report layout in order to reproduce and examine the reason for the slowdown. What do you mean by 37 images? Do you have 37 images per row or the images are for the entire report? If you experience the slowdown in page orientated format do you have horizontal paging and how many pages the report generates? The page count could also cause a delay if you are using the PageCount global object. Additionally we will appreciate if you elaborate on the server configuration OS, CPU, RAM and etc.

We will also appreciate if you open a support thread and send us a runnable project with some dummy data that reproduces the performance issue. Generally without a runnable sample project on our end, it is very hard to give an appropriate advise especially when it comes down to making something work faster/better.

Kind regards,
Peter
the Telerik team

[Rakesh]

Server configuration:
Windows 2008
RAM: 4 GB
No. Of Web Sites: 1
CPU: Intel Xeon Processor 5000
Hard Disk Space: 10 TB


There are 30 or odd pages with 37 images. Each image is being stored in database and is rendered at run-time. I've not used Page Count. Images are shown in a table, based on data.

I'm writing this so you can improve the performance. For us, we are going with Reporting Services now, as we can't wait for performance to be fixed.

I like your support and you have always come-up with solutions for me.

[Steve]

Hi Rakesh,

Thank you for the additional information and the involvement to make the product better. If possible, would you open a support ticket and attach a sample that shows the problem in question as we're still unable to get such rendering times with only 37 images. In this line of thoughts, what is the resolution and size of those images and are you displaying them in full length? Decreasing resolution would certainly reduce memory consumption and thus decrease the rendering time.

Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Mihai Dinculescu]

I'm having the same trouble with slow rendering speed in ReportViewer and PDF export and my client is pushing me to look for alternative reporting engines. The report in question has nothing special, just a lot of textboxes and pages.

[Peter]

Hello Mihai Dinculescu,

We will need more information about your configuration and the report layout in order to reproduce and examine the reason for the slowdown. 

1. Do you have horizontal paging? 
2. Do you use conditional formatting? 
3. Do you use Table item? Generally for table layout we highly recommend table item. Table item is optimized for table layout and performs better than table like layout with textboxes. 
4. The page count could also cause a delay if you are using the PageCount global object. 
5. Additionally we will appreciate if you elaborate on the server configuration OS, CPU, RAM and etc. 

In our local tests the PDF rendering handles 1000 pages table report in 100 seconds. Additionally have in mind that PDF is quite different format from the CSV and requires additional work regarding styling, layout and fonts management. Still we do understand how important performance is and one of our main goals is to improve it.

We highly recommend Performance Considerations KB that share some general performance tips. Let us know how it goes and in order to investigate further we will appreciate if you open a support thread and send us the report definition and some dummy data to debug locally.

All the best,
Peter
the Telerik team

[Mihai Dinculescu]

1. If by horizontal paging you mean landscape, yes.
2. I do use conditional formatting but only twice in report footer. Should be irrelevant.
3. Table layout doesn't fit my report type.
4. I'm not using page count.
5. The client's server is quite strong. win 2003, 4gb ram out of which only 1gb is in use. 2x Xeon 2.66 ghz.

It's not just this report however. I have multiple other reports that features nothing else than many textboxes and report pages.

For example I have a simple 92 page report (textbox based, 16 columns) that takes 55 seconds to export to PDF on my machine. I find this to be a lot considering that I have a I7 3.5ghz cpu, 12 gb ram, Intel SSD.

[Peter]

Hi Mihai,

Thank you for elaborating. Still we cannot provide concrete suggestions without looking at the report, thus we will appreciate if you open a support thread and send us the report definition with some dummy data to profile locally.

All the best,
Peter
the Telerik team