Report Timeout

[Betsy]

Reports version 5.1.11.713
I have a basic table layout report.  If I run the SQL directly in SQL Server it takes 1 second to return 15,852 rows.  If I attempt to run this via a report it times out.  I have increased the timeout to 120 and it still times out.  Why is this happening when the SQL itself only takes a second?  I understand it will take some additional time to pull all that data back and construct objects in memory but it shouldn't take that long.  I just downloaded a trial version of DataDynamics Reports and the same exact report with that engine loads all 378 pages in under 15 seconds.

[Peter]

Hi Heather,

Generally we are currently working on improving Telerik Reporting performance and some of the improvements are scheduled for the Q2 2011 Service Pack 1. 

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

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

Be aware one has to keep in mind that handling reports (be it with large data or large number of report items) usually requires additional resources to handle all the operations. Those operations are much more complex and include data processing (aggregates, filtering, sorting, conditional formatting, expression evaluation, events) and rendering (fonts measurements, layout calculations, paging and etc.). In general report processing/rendering is quite complex process and can't be compared with data retrieval and business layer processing. In our local tests the PDF rendering handles 1000 pages table report in 100 seconds. 

We highly recommend reviewing Performance Considerations KB that shares 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.

Regards,
Peter
the Telerik team