Handling Large Sets of Data

[Chris McMahan]

Hello,

We have currently come into the situation where we will need to be showing large sets of data.  Currently our reports will not get over a few hundred pages in length at the max.  When I say larger, I'm not exactly sure how large just yet.  All I know is that a few of the reports I've tried to test have ended with the server running out of memory trying to "Generate Report".

My question here is what are the stress limitations of the Telerik Reporting tool?  How many pages of data with say 10 columns can the viewer show before it physically won't do it?  I know a lot of that is dependent on hardware specs of the server but there has to be some number somewhere.

Also I've been reading over the

http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/reporting/general/report-generation-is-slow.aspx

knowledge base article trying to tweek some performance issues.  This however, hasn't helped that much considering sub reports will not work in my particular situation. Some of these larger reports are just flat forms of data that can't be broken out.

So from all this there are two major questions that I have.  

1) Is there a way to put a timeout on the "Generating Report" so that the server doesn't sit there and spin, bogging down everyone else?

2) Is there a way to somehow not load the entire report into memory.  Is there a built in way to not have each page stored or created at initial runtime?

Basically I'm just looking for any and all performance tuning practices that I could potentially use to make these very large reports run. 

Also the database returns the datasets back fairly quickly.  The database has never been a problem in any of these issues.

Thank you,

Chris McMahan

[Steve]

Hello Chris,

Thank you for contacting us and up to your questions:

• Unfortunately there is no way to cancel a report from being processed/rendered once the process begins. The web is stateless i.e. the server is not aware of the client browser, so what happens is - you start the processing and it is handled on the server. The memory would keep increasing and would not be freed up until the processing is over and this does not depend on whether your browser is still there waiting for the report to appear or  already closed.
  Telerik Reporting is an embedded engine which means that it is part of your application (not a separate one). In this line of thoughts if you can figure out a way to stop your application at certain time, this would stop the report processing as well.
• The short answer is no. The report would always process and render the whole report because in order for the rendering to produce a result, the whole report needs to be paged i.e. we need to know/have all pages before we can render the report.

The latest Q3 release (see release notes) contains several performance improvements in the report rendering engine that boost it with almost 30%. We highly recommend updating to the latest version and testing your reports with it.

Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

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