Grid performance issues on low-end machines

[Mark]

I am evaluating several UI solutions (Kendo UI, Dhtmlx, ExtJs, jqGrid, etc.) so I created an example page to compare the performance of each solution.  The page contains tabs, form fields and three grids.  

Here's the example page using Kendo UI.

I've found Kendo UI to be very fast except for the grids.  On my beefy dev machine, this page renders in about 1.3 seconds.  On a low end machine (Win XP, IE 8, 1.86 GHz, 1 GB RAM), this page can take 5-8 seconds.  All of the other solutions are much faster than this. I was quite surprised by my findings especially since you tout the performance of these controls.

Here is my grid configuration:

@(Html.Kendo().Grid(Website.Prototype.Helpers.GetGridData(20))
                            .Name("Grid1")
                            .Columns(columns =>
                            {
                                columns.AutoGenerate(true);
                            })
                            .Sortable()
                            .Scrollable() 
                            .Filterable()    
                            .DataSource(dataSource => dataSource        
                                .Ajax()
                                .ServerOperation(false)        
                             )
                        )

I have a few questions:

1. Am I doing something wrong that would cause the performance issues?
2. I thought using the MVC wrapper would give Kendo UI a leg up on the competition because the html needed to render the grid is generated on the server.  However, it seems that it is being regenerated on the client.  Is that correct?
3. The grids are empty in Chrome and Firefox.  It is populated in IE.  Why is that?

  

[Burke]

Hi Mark

Thank you for taking the time to put together this fiddle with examples.

I took a look at the fiddle and unfortunately, it contains the JavaScript and the already mutated DOM so your output is going to be unreliable.  The reason why IE renders it probably has to do with the tokenization of the DOM elements. IE uses Trident while FireFox uses Gecko and Chrome use WebKit.

Could you provide an additional fiddle that we can run?  There should be no performance difference between straight Kendo UI and the server wrappers.

In addition, I will be sending you some benchmark code that should help you determine where your issues may lie.

Burke