How fast is your chart?

Howdy folks! It has been a while since I last blogged. To compensate for it, however, I am bringing some exciting news to our loyal RadChart users.

While not blogging I have been busy working with two of the smartest people in our company to bring you some really dramatic performance improvements to RadChart. I have to admit that in the past performance was not paramount for our product. We focused on features, appearance, ease of use to produce one of the most versatile charting components on the market. Today, however, marks the beginning of another direction. Starting with the Q1 2010 release, RadChart will also be one of the fastest silverlight charts out there.

What better way to demonstrate this than to bind the chart to a very large data source – say 1 million records? Not a problem!

So how does this work? Obviously we can’t possibly show all that data on screen. The spot above doesn’t even have a million pixels to draw itself.

So what do we do? The solution is simple – do what charts do best – summarize the data. RadChart achieves this using a technique called Sampling. Put simply the control splits data into groups and aggregates each group using one of the many provided sampling functions (you can even write your own). The end result is a graph that summarizes the real data close enough while performing infinitely faster.

To make it easier to drill-down inside and navigate the entire data source we have also provided zooming and scrolling functionality much like the one present in RadChart for ASP.NET AJAX, but this time we have also included modified RadSlider to make it even more convenient to browse.

Finally some notes:

• You can try the new performance improvements for yourself if you download the beta 1 release which already shipped last week.
• I know the data looks cheesy, but hey, we need to generate it if you need this much and keep the download size small.

Happy charting!