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Does anyone have experience displaying large set of data using JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit? Basically, I am doing research on how my project can provide visual representation of social network... and playing around with JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit I did not notice any performance degradation... meanwhile I saw this:

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit - interaction seems a little slow, maybe that's on purpose in the demos from javascript framework for relationship visualization

and

JsVIS is pretty nice, but a little slow with larger graphs. from Graph visualization library in JavaScript

this makes me worry that under real data it might crack? So just asking..

plus i looked at Flare, it seems like another good alternative, but looking at their site it looks like it hasn't been updated in almost 2 years... is it totally outdated?

Community
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krinker
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3 Answers3

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To answer my own question.... performance is not that great. I wrote a script to populate json object used in ForceDirected object with 100 nodes and it was terribly slow... will give www.graphviz.org a try.

krinker
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It's quick enough if not using such things like gradient background and other processor consuming visualisation.

I made Sunburst with 3 levels and about 100 nodes. Quick enough.

Dmitri
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OK, I'm totally biased here (disclaimer: I'm an author of it), but KeyLines can handle several hundred nodes just fine - it is commercially licensed.

In general terms - aside from the issue of what framework to choose - I've found that canvas performance depends strongly on whether the browser+device has hardware acceleration. For example, before iOS5, iPad performance for canvas in Safari really was dreadful, but since iOS5 it flies along. Android is more variable. Most desktop combinations of browser/OS are now fine for high performing canvas rendering.

Another consideration for graph layouts is whether long running layouts block the browser's rendering loop - we've had to develop around the issue of long running (i.e., more than a few seconds) tasks locking up the browser. Users like to see progress bars ticking along & that is possible provided you take the right steps in the layout code..

Joe Parry
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  • Thanks for posting your answer! Please be sure to read the [FAQ on Self-Promotion](http://stackoverflow.com/faq#promotion) carefully. Also note that it is *required* that you post a disclaimer every time you link to your own site/product. I know you said you were 'biased', but you should be 100% clear about why... (maybe you just use it and really like it a lot) – Andrew Barber Feb 06 '12 at 20:26
  • Thanks - edited to make biases clearer - sorry! Hope the other considerations are useful to think about, independent of framework. For the record there are good open source libraries out there too, like D3 & protovis. It all depends on what you are looking for. – Joe Parry Feb 06 '12 at 21:42