RadChart Performance Issue

[SCT]

Dear Telerik Team,

 

Currently, we are working on our web.app. which utilizes your library for ATLAS. Getting a fast chart component was one of the reasons for our decision to buy your library. Recently, we have using MSChart on certain web page which resides in our solution. However, we are unfavorably surprised, because of your Radchart performance ussues. We are afraid of the incorrect utilization of the RadChart component, therefore we would like to ask you for a proper technique to RadChart preparing as well as rendering.  

 

Please, have a look at our performance test, which we have made for the comparison.  The test were proceeded on the same machine/IDE/database/.NET framework  (so, on the same HW & SW configuration).

 
Here is our source code snippet: (Let us remark that we need to specify the color for each of the series.)

 

            foreach (KeyValuePair<DataPointEntity, DataTable> dt in data)

                            {

                     ChartSeries chartSeries = new ChartSeries(radChart.Series);

                     chartSeries.Name = dt.Key.Name;

                     chartSeries.Appearance.ShowLabels = false;

                     chartSeries.SetColors(dt.Key.Color);

                     chartSeries.Appearance.FillStyle.MainColor = dt.Key.Color;

 

                    for (int i = 0; i < dt.Value.Rows.Count; ++i)

                         chartSeries.AddItem(new ChartSeriesItem(
                             ((DateTime)dt.Value.Rows[i][1]).ToOADate(), (double)dt.Value.Rows[i][2]));

 

                    radChart.Series.Add(chartSeries);

            }

 

Here are the obtained results:

  

MSChart:

 Preparing 27 000 values       0:0:0.093 s

 Rendering: 13 s

  

RadChart:

 Preparing 27 000 values       0:0:2.160 s

 Rendering: 30 s

What we have made wrong, please?  Must we done this by using a DataTable (or something similar)? 

 

There is series type “Fastline” in MS chart for faster rendering. Do you have any tip or idea how to set up the RadChart instance to accomplish faster rendering, or is there something for increase the rendering speed?

We suppose that Silverlight version of the RadChart maybe faster, but we want to build our web app on ATLAS.

 

Kind Regards,
SCT

[Ves]

Hello,

While databinding is the preferred way to populate RadChart, I do not believe you would gain any significant improvement by switching to it. The problem is in the large amount of data. The product was designed to be easily customizable and feature rich, but this comes at a price -- it does not cope well with extremely busy charts or rendering a lot of graphs on a single page. The control is mostly targeted for casual situations which do not require a high performance solution. There is a trade off to make between high customization and high performance and RadChart is in the rich features path as it is what most of our customers are interested in.

As 27000 values could hardly be displayed in several hundred pixels, my suggestion would be to process the data before sending it to the chart. You can get a series of values, calculate their average and plot that value within the chart.

Best regards,
Ves
the Telerik team

[SCT]

Thank you very much for the information.

Kind regards,
SCT

[SCT]

Dear Telerik team,

we apologize for our previous claim about your RadChart performance. We've performed the performance tests again and the results about rendering were nearly the same as by MS Chart. (Meanwhile we found a few of development mistakes by our previous tests).

Kind regards,
SCT

[SCT]

Hello,

we've found some time difference by ViewState enabling upon RadChart additionally. By enabled ViewState the chart rendering tooks about

twofold time consumption in comparison to disabled ViewState.
Is such behaviour correct, or is there some another factors which decelerate the RadChart rendering?

Thanks in advance,
SCT

[Giuseppe]

Hello,

If your use case permits this, using the control with disabled ViewState will be generally faster (with all other conditions being equal).

There are two main reasons that cause performance degradation for the chart control -- usage of excessive amount of data points and usage of the automatic algorithm that tries to resolve the overlapping of series item labels (to disable it, set RadChart.IntelligentLabelsEnabled = false). The smart labels algorithm also is significantly more problematic if the chart is populated with lots of data (the performance degrades exponentially and not linearly).


Regards,
Giuseppe
the Telerik team