Comments on: Faster than “fastest ASP.NET Grid”

By: shane

shane — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:04:19 +0000

Jimmy,
sounds very promising and no need for the screen shots. i ll go with your word.
thank you

By: jimmyps

jimmyps — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:04:15 +0000

Shane: Good news, I have managed to run a stress test during the weekend to see the WebGrid performance under heavy load.

The result is very good, which indicates stable memory consumption under 150 users load under 2 minutes constant testing. The test is performed using Visual Studio 2008 Performance Load Test.

% Committed Bytes In Use. Min: 50.5MB, Max: 54.1MB, Avg: 52.7.

After the load test, the w3wp.exe is showing only 64.MB usage. This indicates that the memory counter is showing accurate and believable results.

If you are interested in a screenshot, please let me know your email address and I’ll capture a shot for you.

Regards,
Jimmy.

By: jimmyps

jimmyps — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:21:04 +0000

Iain: As you may aware, WebGrid.NET 6.0 comes with Pivot Charting feature. The Pivot Charting feature is using a third party Charting engine from Nevron as the runtime engine to draw the Chart. In SP1, we will employ a built-in Charting engine (we will try to produce consistent results as close as those in the previous Charting engine).

We will no longer use Nevron Chart starting from SP1, although existing customers who already deploy the Pivot Charting may still use Nevron Chart as the engine (the Grid will have a property that allow you to easily change the engine).

A good thing with the new, internally-developed Charting engine is that it will allow us to provide more enhancements to the Charting engine in the future version.

Regards,
Jimmy.

By: Shane

Shane — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:10:56 +0000

Yeah Jimmy,
thakns for the quick response. i had this problem with the early versions of webgrid (i think it was version 4.0) and i am sure a lot changed from 4.0 to 6.0.
the problem basically was the memory usage. with 25k data the amount of the memory used was around 300mb, opening the same page in another browser window was making this number jump upto 450mb. Navigating away from the grid page and coming back to it was making it go up more and this is with a couple users only. And after memory usage reached its max GC was doing its job and clearing everthing out which was also causing the session states to be cleared out. And users were redirected to the error page. it was pretty frustrating. The suggestion of using session state for caching and not memory crashed the server in about 30 secs. Was completely impractical.

This is the reason i asked for a stress test. In individual usage the grid may give superior results but does it still perform that well under heavy load with several hundred users?

thanks again
-shane

By: Iain Baxter

Iain Baxter — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:19:10 +0000

Thanks for your quick response. Your sample gives me hope. As your grid evolves into more of a BI tool, our customers are expecting to load it up with large data sets, and do analysis. This is presently causing us server loading headaches. It would be nice to be able to provide some lightweight BI on the web, without the server overload.

You mentioned a new charting engine – sounds interesting – can you elaborate?

By: jimmyps

jimmyps — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:50:09 +0000

Iain: We’ll publish the source code of the sample soon in our Support’s Knowledge Base. Our team is waiting to deliver WebGrid 6.0 SP1 which contains a new Charting engine, and other dozens of enhancements, along with the sample.

By: jimmyps

jimmyps — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:47:17 +0000

Shane: The ability to release memory is beyond control’s code. It is managed by .NET Memory Management automatically (also known as Garbage Collector). However, we have tested and clarified that the memory allocated by WebGrid is properly released when .NET performed GC.

We are going to perform some stress-test soon and publish the results. Although I am pretty sure that the WebGrid can handle the large users access with very minimal memory usage. This is made possible because WebGrid v6 is no longer the data provider, but WebGrid is a pure data visualization (UI) which grabs the data from provider, which is ISDataSource in this context. ISDataSource itself is a rock solid data provider built on the top of high performance architecture, which acts as the mediator between database backend and UI.

Regards,
Jimmy.

By: Iain Baxter

Iain Baxter — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:26:06 +0000

Is the source code of this sample available to customers?

By: shane

shane — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:51:16 +0000

webgrid was not able to release memory after several loads or operations. after each load or page operations like sorting, paging the size of the memory used was getting bigger and bigger which was ending with an application crash. Is this solved now?

Or is there any stress test results? Say 100 users are accessing the page with the webgrid that loads 350k data all at the same time. What is the memory usage then and how long does page load take “in average” with that many users?

knowing different aspects of the performance test will help more in further decisions.

thanks
-shane

By: jimmyps

jimmyps — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:25:28 +0000

Hello Moe,

The HTML codes have been reduced significantly in v6. And furthermore, the w3wp.exe is now consumed properly. You can try to download WebGrid 6.0 and try the live samples that included in it.

Regards,
Jimmy.