Image binding performance in pivot

Question

I have made a calendar control based on the pivot control. Every pivot item represents one month. In this way I don't have the annoying arrows, which usually everybody use to switch between the months and I really love the native way you can browse the calendar. The calendar itself is pretty fancy and in each cell for every day, I have several images. The problem is that the performance is awful. Initially I have bound the images visibility property with a bool property(using a converter), but I have read that the visibility binding isn't good, cause it redraws the UI elements again. Then I have decided to bind the Opacity property of the images with the same bool property from my ViewModel. The performance got better, but it is still slow. So, basically, I have a calendar with cells and 3-4 images in each cell. I am setting each image's visibility/opacity using binding, but in both ways the performance is very bad.

So, basically in each calendar cell I have 5 x this image:

<Image Source="../Images/blabla.png" IsHitTestVisible="False"
                                    Opacity="{Binding IsBlaBla, Converter={StaticResource BoolToOpacityConverter}}" />

Have you guys have an idea how I can improve the performance? I am out of ideas. :-(

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

You could try setting the CacheMode to BitmapCache. See my answer to another question, it contains details of the BitmapCache option.

<Image Source="../Images/blabla.png" 
       IsHitTestVisible="False"
       Opacity="{Binding IsBlaBla, Converter={StaticResource BoolToOpacityConverter}}"
       CacheMode="BitmapCache" />

I also remember reading somewhere that the jpeg decoder is a lot faster than the png decoder. So, unless you need transparency, you could convert your images to jpeg.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 09:58

Assuming your performance issue is one of the UI being slow to interact with, you might consider using David Anson's LowProfileImageLoader to alleviate the bottleneck affecting this.

Keep a low profile [LowProfileImageLoader helps the Windows Phone 7 UI thread stay responsive by loading images in the background] - Delay's Blog

There's no substitute for customer feedback! [Improving Windows Phone 7 application performance now a bit easier with LowProfileImageLoader and DeferredLoadListBox updates] - Delay's Blog

Also, there are a lot of things you can look at to tune performance. Details in the latter parts of my answer in this Question.

Design advices for quick navigation between view

Image binding performance in pivot

2 Answers2