Performance Tips

In This Topic

This topic gives a few tips that may increase the performance of the component in different situations:

Common Tips

Switch the render surface to Window. In this mode the control will use video board hardware accelerated rendering, which is much faster than software rendering.
Texture-based filling types like gradient, pattern, advanced gradient and texture slow down the chart. The fastest filling type is color. This applies to all kinds of 2D and 3D objects including the background.
When possible try to use lines instead of polygons. For example when you display a line chart it is faster to use line style instead of tube style for the line segments.
Some primitives are more time-consuming to render than others. This is especially true for primitives that use smoothing like smooth edge bars and smooth edge pies.
The rendering speed is directly dependent on the size of the chart window. Smaller charts will render faster.
Avoid calling the Refresh method of the chart control when it is possible.
When you present large data sets (with 1000 or more data points) you may consider to use some kind of resampling of the data. This can increase not only the performance but also the readability of the chart.
Set the CachePanel property to true for panels that have constant content. For example legends in manual mode, labels or watermarks. This will force the control to cache their representation in a bitmap or texture (depending on the current render device) which reduces the overall time needed to refresh the chart.

GDI+ Tips

In general shadow rendering decreases the speed of the component. If the rendering speed is important, but you still need shadows in your charts, it is best to use Solid shadows. Radial and Gaussian shadows are relatively fast for small objects, but it is not recommended to use them for large objects like the chart back wall.
Image filters can significantly slow down the chart. If it is necessary to use image filters apply them on smaller objects and set the properties controlling the blur convolution kernels to smaller values (in the range [1-5]).

OpenGL Tips

Special effects like jittering, antialiasing, and lighting decrease the rendering speed. When lighting is required, for maximum performance we recommend you to use only one directional light-source.
If you're looking for maximum performance you should not use transparent objects in the 3D scene. Alpha-blended 2D objects like labels, legend, watermarks and texts do not influence the overall performance as much as blended 3D objects, yet they are slower than opaque 2D objects.

Server Control Tips

Web applications looking for optimal performance should schedule a clean up job for the temporary files and disable the auto delete feature of the control.