How to improve WinJS Pivot Control performance - windows-phone-8.1

I have an application based around Pivot Control, where user can dynamically add the pivot items based on the content they would like to see. Each content basically contains a listview that is containing the data retreived asynchronously via winjs xhr object.
The listviews in different pivots might contain different amount of items and while the number is relatively low (up to 20) the performance even with animations is acceptable, but as soon as one of the listview has more than 100 items the sliding between the pivot items get really painful to watch, it just lags.
I've tried to optimize the application via
modifying the listview itemTemplate not through the binding template, but very basic content rendering.. that has helped A LOT for the listview to render quickly
disabling the animations in WinJS.UI
Even though the above measures have helped quite a lot, I can still see that while navigating from the pivot that contains a lot of items in the listview, the application hangs (does I don't know what) and then it slides to the next pivot. This might last up to 5 seconds and it's really not the best UX.
Just to make it clear, the content to show in the listview is being fetched at the time the application is being initialized, so the performance issue is definitely not caused by any possible XHR requests.
Could please anyone tell me what is happening behind the slide-out/slide-in operations as all I would do is just to set the content to dispay=none ! but it takes ages to display the next pivot item.
Thank you!

Related

Is there an optimal row number of lists in Autodesk.Viewing.UI.DataTable?

When ever the row number of the lists are high (what I mean is sometimes even only 170-200 rows), on scroll down/up, DataTable refreshes itself somehow and all the custom css, click functions and events are being removed. Moreover the list is sometimes freezing or scrollbar is getting stuck at the bottom.
If I dont use DataTable.groupByColumn(5000) the performance and css is better but I still loose click events on the table.
The reason why I use DataTable.groupByColumn() with an extreme number is the row style. As default the background color of rows are black and white, it is not easy to read and confusing. But anyhow even if I don't use groupByColumn() I am loosing onClick functions when I scroll down on high row number lists...
Is there a way to avoid this 'refresh' or is there an optimal row number to keep in mind when we make development on DataTable ?
As an example I've created 285 row list with random strings to check if the problem is arising from our data structure but unfortunately same problem occurs in example too.
Do we have the chance to optimize it ?
EDIT
I have realized that DataTable uses 'clusterize.js', that's why I have used event delegation instead of giving functions to each row but this time all functions are working delayed depending on the length of the list.
Anybody has any idea ?
As you've found yourself, the DataTable is just a simple wrapper for the Clusterize.js library. Any potential optimizations would therefore have to be discussed with the library's community.

What is the best practice for displaying huge chat logs or console logs in a scrollable window? (AS3)

I'm writing a graphic console that highlights different entries and stores things when you input them (in AS3) but I've found that once there are thousands of entries, the program starts lagging and scrolling is slow. If I want scrolling to be animated with acceleration it gets even slower.
How do I move the giant block of objects that are my stored entries up and down?
Do I have to progressively load messages around where the user is looking? How does the scrollbar handle this, then?
you should create a custom container instead TextField, it would be easier to build an accelerated scrolling too,
each log entry would be an extended DisplayObject that holds anything you want just like inflating layouts in android.
the most important part should be reducing Memory usage:
you may only store plain text of log enteries in something like a global array and when scroll position is close enough, generate this layouts, then adding them in container to show, and vice versa for removing far behind chats.
however this proccess stills using much memory during runtime.
so, just according the concept of android's DiskLruCache, it is possible to storing some part of our invisible data which would be too far from our scroll position to disk instead memory, using SharedObject's.
How do I move the giant block of objects that are my stored entries up
and down?
You don't. As you have noticed, when the number Display Objectson the DisplayList greatly increases, the memory overhead increases and the housekeeping details of managing the Display Objectseventually causes performance to suffer. You don't mention any details of how you are implementing what you have so far so my comments will be general.
The way this is handled by various platform list components in Flex, iOS and I assume, Flash, is to only display the minimum number of objects needed, and as the user scrolls, objects are shuffled in and out of the render list. A further optimization is to use a "pool" of "template" objects which are reused so you don't pay a initialization time penalty. There is probably an actual name for this ("...buffering...") technique but I don't know what it is (hopefully some kind person will provide it and a link to a fuller description for how it works).
And as for how it works – you can DIY it, figuring out, as the user scrolls, which objects are moving off-screen and can be recycled, which are going to move on-screen, etc. Of course this all assumes that you have your objects stored in a data structure like and Array, ArrayList or ArrayCollection. As an alternative to coding all this from scratch, you might see if the DataGrid or List components will meet your needs – they manage all of this for you.
Flash Tutorial: The DataGrid Component (youTube video)
Customize the List component
Lots of other examples and resources out there.
(again, I work in Flex where the DataGrid and other list-based components can customized extensively using "skins" and custom item renderers for visual style – not sure if it is the same in Flash)

Should the number of html elements being loaded on a page be monitored?

I have an application that displays a page with 5-10000 rows in a table element and has a drop down menu that switches to other views with a similar structure. Currently I do an async request when switching between views (I also clear/remove the current view from the document) and load the appropriate list each time; however, I was thinking of
1) loading all views in the background before they are requested for viewing so they load instantly on click.
and
2) Just hiding a particular set of rows rather than removing it so if the client navigates back it will be instant as well.
This would mean that potentially 10s of thousands of html elements would be loaded into the current document; is this a problem? What if it was more than 10's of thousands?
Loading 10000+ HTML elements onto your page is not a very smart idea. If the user's computer is of normal to fast speed, the user may experience slight lag, and if the user's computer is slow, it may even cause a system crash (depending on the amount of RAM on the computer).
A technique you could explore is to lazyload the HTML elements - this means that when the user scrolls down to a particular portion of the page, then the elements are loaded via AJAX. (also known as "infinite scrolling").
This means that the browser's rendering engine does not have to render so many elements in one go, and that saves memory, and increases speed.
It depends on the HTML elements, but I would say as a rule of thumb, don't load upfront.
When I say it depends on the elements, I mean take a look at facebook for example. They load maybe 10 or 20 items into the feed, and then add more as you scroll, because each item is so rich in content (photos, videos, etc).
However on the flipside of that, think about how much info is in each row, if it's say, less than 500 bytes, 500 x 10000 = 5MB, which isn't an awful load for a web request, and if you can cache intelligently, maybe it will be a lot less than that.
The bottom line is, don't assume that the number of HTML elements matters so much, think about the amount of data that it amounts to. My advice, cross that bridge when you get there. Monitor your request times, if they are too long, come up with an AJAX page loader, which shouldn't be too hard.
The size of your html document would be conciderable...
I once got a page with 5000~10000 items (table rows) and the browser (IE) was rendering way too long (downloading the page, parsing and rendering it).
The best solution seems to me to set up a WebService with a LazyLoading system.
So IMHO yes, the number of element in a HTML document should be monitored.
Yes of course! The number of element in a HTML document can be monitored.! Use FireBug in Firefox!

How to get a car spinning with AS3? A 360 degree view

first post on here so be gentle!
I am currently designing an ad banner for my college assignment, the main feature i have is a car spinning, like a full 360 degree view.
Now I have took all of the media I needed and photoshopped them to how they need to look I just need some diction of where to go next.
I did want it where you can click and drag anywhere on the screen and it pulls the car around to where you want it, but I don't even know where to start with that! (please help if you can)
So I thought I would instead have it as a sort of image gallery with a next and previous button to select the next frame you want. But I don't like the way it looks so I was wondering if there was a way with action script where I could click on a button(next/previous) and the car would spin until I un-click? Rather than me having to keep clicking to load the next frame.
Also if I could I wanted a left to right scroll bar what could control the images, do you know any way of doing that?
Many Thanks in advance for ANY help!
Jordan.
If you want a commercial solution:
Krpano -> very advanced, excellent support, highly recommended for panoramas, 2D object is a bit lacking tho. Examples of 2D object
Object2VR -> very easy to use, not that great support, lacking API.
I would go personally for krpano because it is simply a superior tool. Great for panos, tons of possibilities. If you want it easy, go for Object2VR.
Now if you want to program it, and you need to program it, there are many options how you can do it. First of all, you need to load all the images into your app. Even if you don't maintain them in memory (that would be prefered, tho), you should load them so they are cached and can be reloaded fast. Your rotation can be achieved by "re-loading" the next image, or if you keep them in memory by simply referencing the next index of the array/vector. You always keep a reference index and upon click you simple increase the index and load the image. You than swap the images. It is too broad to explain, you will simply have to begin and ask for advice with some specific code.

Are large html tables slow?

I've recently been developing an application using tables with a large number (hundreds) of rows. The rows contain tabular data and each row contains two drop down lists as well as link which displays hidden table rows directly below it.
I am currently experiencing lengthy delays when attempting to select a value from the drop down, and when displaying the hidden table rows.
Is the table the source of my problem here?
From what I gather, HTML tables can be appear to be slow to render if widths are not explicitly stated. If they aren't, the browser has to finish loading the contents of the cells before it can calculate the correct widths.
MSDN has some information here on their "Building High Performance HTML Pages" article that may help; they suggest the following (regarding tables specifically):
Set the table-layout CSS attribute to fixed on the table.
Explicitly define col objects for each column.
Set the WIDTH attribute on each col.
The problem is more than likely the rendering of the controls (100 select boxes) rather than the table layout. How many items are there in the drop down list? Does it perform the same way in all browsers on different operating systems?
Sorry to be so vague but generally tables aren't slow to render, but are looked down upon because of their lack of accessibility (although of course much of the idealism is the fact screen readers don't like them).
I can state from experience that it's almost certainly the dropdown lists that are causing the slowness. Tables with hundreds of rows can render almost instantaneously if they only contain text, but add a dropdown list to each row with just a few dozen options, and now even 50 rows will take a noticeable amount of time.
Try to design around the need for dropdowns in the table rows - if this is a form (and why else would you have dropdowns?), have the user select the row they wish to edit, and then put the editable controls only in that row, either via AJAX if you're into that sort of thing, or a more traditional "detail view" approach.
I've not noticed any slowdowns when displaying static tables with a few thousand entries, but adding effects like sorting or dynamic zebra-striping can quickly bog down even a modern browser on a fast computer. Make sure you're not running any JavaScript iterations across the entire table.
Whatever you come up with, test the approach in a couple of browsers on a couple of platforms, with some slower machines. I once had an app that was speedy everywhere except in Safari for Macintosh. It turned out to be something about the way it rendered the dropdowns. There's just no substitute for experimentation. Uhm, I meant testing.
If you know how wide each column should be, try specifying table-layout: fixed in the CSS for the table and see if that makes any difference (it should stop the browser trying to re-render the whole table just because you've toggled visibility on a few rows.)
IE does not handle very large DOMs manipulations well at all.
If you have two selects in each of the rows and a link, and let's assume each select has 5 options that's (((5options + 1select) * 2) + 1 link + 3tds + 1tr) at least 17 DOM items per row. Plus, if I'm not mistaken, ie treats each text item as it's own DOM node. So add another 10 DOM nodes for the drop down text and 1 for the link, that's 28 DOM items per row.
I agree with the others that it's not only your table that is causing the slow loading but the population of the dropdown list as well.
If it helps you can try paginating your table. You can use JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery or extjs for pagination and AJAX.