Ext GWT Grid Performance Improvements
September 29, 2008 by Darrell Meyer
The Ext GWT Grid component, which was introduced in 1.1, plays an important role in most applications. Because of this, it is important for Grid to perform as fast as possible, especially when rendering large amounts of data. For the upcoming 1.1.1 release we took a fine grained look at the code to identify any performance bottlenecks. Code was tested and analyzed in host mode as well as all supported browsers. After this research, a couple of key changes to the code resulted in much faster rendering times. The new code was so much faster that I thought it would be nice to share the results.
A new test page was setup to allow both the old code and new code to be executed and timed. The tests were conducted on 3 different machines, with multiple browsers. For each test, rendering times where measured for 200 and 400 row grids. Here are the results of the tests:
| Browser | 200 Old | 200 New | Change | 400 Old | 400 New | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dual Xeon 3.16GZ , 8GB Mem | ||||||
| Host Mode IE | 344 ms | 362 ms | 95% | 1562 ms | 719 ms | 217% |
| IE7 | 3200 ms | 1470 ms | 218% | 20064 ms | 2906 ms | 690% |
| FF2 | 2469 ms | 469 ms | 526% | 7218 ms | 843 ms | 856% |
| FF3 | 711 ms | 264 ms | 269% | 3368 ms | 585 ms | 576% |
| Safari Windows | 860 ms | 172 ms | 500% | 2594 ms | 344 ms | 754% |
| Mac Duo Core 2.5GZ, 2GB Mem | ||||||
| Safari | 1343 ms | 287 ms | 468% | 3719 ms | 565 ms | 658% |
| FF3 | 1276 ms | 419 ms | 305% | 3056 ms | 818 ms | 374% |
| Intel Duo Core 2.4GZ, 3.5GB Mem | ||||||
| IE7 | 12716 ms | 1855 ms | 685% | 37171 ms | 3691 ms | 1007% |
| FF2 | 5174 ms | 828 ms | 625% | 18274 ms | 1805 ms | 1012% |
| Safari | 1787 ms | 327 ms | 546% | 5293 ms | 654 ms | 809% |
As you can see, rendering times have been significantly reduced. You can run the test page yourself to see the improvements first hand.
The new grid code is available to SVN users, and will be included in our next release.
Posted on September 29th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Sounds great!
Will this also be usable for normal ext users which do not use GWT, or is it GWT specific?
Posted on September 29th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Will be this in Extjs svn (js library, not gwt)?
Posted on September 29th, 2008 at 4:00 am
Beautiful! 7000ms vs 1000ms on my old athlon 4000 x2!
Posted on September 29th, 2008 at 7:23 am
I also want the answer to the same question: is this GWT-specific or will it be availeable to standard JS users?
Posted on September 29th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Nice job, Darell. The results are really encouraging !
Posted on September 29th, 2008 at 10:04 am
The changes made to Grid were only applicable to Ext GWT, not Ext JS which already performs at top speeds.
Posted on October 1st, 2008 at 1:10 pm
On my dual core T5600 1.83GHZ:
Before After %
IE7 1920 1060 0.45
FF3 360 220 0.39
Chrome 330 193 0.42
FF3 4.8x faster than IE7
Chrome 5.5x faster than IE7
Chrome 1.1x (12%) faster than FF3
Posted on October 2nd, 2008 at 11:53 am
the obligatory one: when will we see 1.1.1?
Posted on October 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
it is nice, to see that the test page on my “AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+” which is runs @ 2.8GHz, the old code in FF3 finishes in ~ 500ms, and the new code is ~ 200ms.
Posted on October 10th, 2008 at 8:41 am
That’s cool.
Anyway, I’ve experienced some performance issues when resizing the browser. Even with the GXT explorer page, if one resizes the browser it takes some time to “react”. Is there any open issue on that? Any Blog?