Hi,
We are using Infragistics controls in our project. We are really concerned about the performance of the controls espically the UltraWebGrid which we are using. There is a huge amount of data that is being displayed in the grid(more than 400 rows and 80 columns) and lots of client side functionalities also. Presently the performance is really poor. Please suggest some ways to increase the performance.
I just wanted to know something about the infragistics support. Like
1. How fast the queries are answered?
2. If we want some additional functionalities to be implemented then is it possible for you people to implement it or not and if yes then how much time will it take?
3. The project we are working on is a really big one and requires a very good perfomance. Will infragistics UltraWebGrid and other controls be able to provide such a good performance?
Akshay
Performance often depends a lot on what you are doing. I once revesed the sort order of a medium-sized dataset and it more than quadrupled the response time.
To see what others have done, use the Search function at the top of the page. Look for "performance" and (separately) for "slow".
And please keep in mind the fact that, when a WebGrid perfoms well, nobody ever posts anything like "Hey, everyone, my WebGrid has a wonderful response time." ;-)
My UltraWebGrid is performing fine! It's the display that is currently giving me troubles right now ;)
I implemented a custom (outside of webgrid) paging solution that displays 20 rows and 5 columns. Was going to try virtual scrolling, but limitations on my db access prevent that for now...
I'm still looking for every eke of performance I can get, I am going to see what script combing does for me. See: http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/tony_lombardo/archive/2008/07/28/script-combining-what-s-the-big-deal.aspx
So far, as a (paying) customer for a week now, I've been impressed with the support I've gotten both here in the forums, and via their chat interface.
Hello All,
This is turning out to be a great thread on performance in general - thanks to everyone contributing. My take on this is that Webforms (ASP.NET) will always be slower in general than desktops, especially on IE - DHTML / Javascript is a completely different platform and has its pros and cons.
As far as grids in particular are concerned, here is what I can suggest:
0. Check out the help documentation for performance tips:
http://help.infragistics.com/Help/NetAdvantage/NET/2008.2/CLR2.0/html/WebGrid_Performance.html
1. Use profiling tools to see where the problems is. Sometimes the problem can be at the datasource layer (slow SQL query). Sometimes it can be server-side processing (the C# server-side code). Sometimes it can be slow loading time (maybe - a lot of HTML generated). Sometimes it is the browser itself that is sluggish (client-side / javascript problems). Knowing where the bottleneck is makes things much easier.
2. Use server side data caching. That is, never execute a complex and time consuming SQL query twice - store the result (for example DataTable in the application Cache and then retrieve from there on rebind).
3. Use ASP.NET Page Caching. That is the OutputCache directive. ASP.NET has a great great caching infrastructure built-in - through OutputCache you can customize caching in many ways (and invalidate cache when needed when data changes with Sql Dependencies, or through time dependency, etc)
4. Play with ViewState. Sometimes in some scenarios it is possible to turn ViewState off (EnableViewState = false) and then rebind from cache in each postback to server. ViewState off will reduce the HTML size signifficantly.
5. Script combining may also work fine (it was already suggested by a customer here, check out Tony Lombardo's post on our forums)
6. Install a ZIP add-on for IIS. There are many ZIP compression Add-Ons for IIS. ZIP compressors typically zip the IIS response and browsers decompress it on the client - this may speed things up a LOT. Just make sure you are using popular ones and test before deployment. I've seen page load times go up 5-6 times just because of that.
7. Use Paging - either built-in or custom - it is unlikely that your end-users need more than 20-30 rows at a time, so PageSize > 20 will just make the requests slower whie not helping end-users a lot.
8. Use Load On Demand / AJAX. The grid has at least 4 different modes of that (Virtual Scrolling, AJAX, LoadOnDemand) - check out the samples and help for that - fetch only the data you need to display and load the rest when user interaction occurs.
9. Change the interface. I am not sure many end-users will be able to cope with 80 columns and 400 rows at once. I myself find it difficult to even read more than 5 columns and 20 rows at a time (this is 100 cells with data). You can show the rest of the rows with paging and / or AJAX, while for the columns - you can show them on row click in a different window, HTML placeholder, or even in our great WebDialogWindow component.
HTH, and keep the feedback coming - great stuff.