Optimizing Highcharts Performance

[martinez248]

Hello,

First, thank you so much for developing such a great product! It is by far the best JS plotting package I have found (and I have used a lot).

The issue I'm having is with very large data sets. I'm trying to create time series with several data sets each with several thousand points. When I highlight a point it takes several seconds for the tooltip to even come up. Highlighting a line is really painful and zooming sometimes crashes the entire browser. I'm using a pretty beefy Mac (12GB RAM, 8 Cores, etc..) with Snow Leopard and Mozilla Firefox 3.6.8.

I'm wondering what is the absolute most optimal way to render highcharts with performance in mind (things like turning off animations, etc...). What are all the options I can turn off (or on) that will improve performance? Have you stress tested Highcharts to its extreme limits? Is there a breaking point?

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!

-J

[martinez248]

bump for great justice.

[osno]

we've had some success with disabling the data markers,not sure if that's an option for you:

plotOptions: {
line: {
marker: {
enabled: false
}
}
}

For discussion on zooming performance you can check http://highslide.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=7659

[torstein.honsi]

Make sure you are running Highcharts version 2.0.4, where a performance improvement was made.

Several thousand points are a bit much. Experiments have shown that disabling the mouse tracking on points speed up things, so in a future version we may run position tracking in the plot area instead of having mouseover and mouseout events on each point.

[hankmoody]

Hi,

What can I do to specify that only certain datapoints of a series should have markers and mouse tracking enabled? For fairly large series it makes no sense in my case for each point to provide a tooltip and it does seem to consume more cpu resources.

Thanks!

[hfrntt]

You can disable certain data points, see: http://jsfiddle.net/23GDw/ however you can't disable mouse tracking for points, only for a whole series. I advice to preprocess your data and interpolate it.

[Nickproger]

Hmm.. The same issue with big chunk of data and browser-freezing when chart is rendered.
But when chart is ready, then it works fine, without any problem.

Seems that there are some hard calculations before chart will be plotted.

Is it possible to separate those calculations with help Web-workers or break them up with setTimeout() for avoiding browser-freezing, or something like that?

[Fusher]

There are plans to use web-workers, but right now we are focused on Highcharts 3.0 and fixing bugs. Meanwhile I advice to use this solution: http://www.highcharts.com/component/con ... highcharts

[vickychijwani]

There are plans to use web-workers, but right now we are focused on Highcharts 3.0 and fixing bugs. Meanwhile I advice to use this solution: http://www.highcharts.com/component/con ... highcharts

Sorry for re-opening an old thread, but I found this as the only result of a web search for "Highcharts web workers". I just wanted to know, are the plans to use web workers underway yet? I believe that would significantly improve performance for large dynamic charts that are being updated very frequently (<= 1 update / sec).

[KacperMadej]

There are no official plans for implementing web workers into Highcharts as of now. To boost performance of a chart it is possible to use boost.js module - more info: http://www.highcharts.com/component/con ... ance-boost