If you’re building a large scale, enterprise resources planning application that involve thousands of resources and events in a single month view alone, you would have quickly realizing serious performance issues during the development process. In this post, I’ll share some insights on the common pitfalls and bottleneck in performance, and how our latest scheduling component completely address them in elegant ways.

The Challenges

There are at least 4 factors that would lead to performance issue in most enterprise applications and specifically in scheduling applications.

1. Huge data transfer size.Take a look at our recent case study on a car rental application. The car rental could have over 3,000 events made in a month. In most scheduling component in the market, all data will be retrieved at once in the page load. That transmits over 2MB of data sent over the cloud which translates to 6-7 seconds waiting even on a broadband connection.
2. Long rendering process.With rich user interface possible nowadays, web developers often forgot that a web application is not a desktop application. The nature of web application still have several common constraints such as the amount of elements which are considerably good on a page. In the case of enterprise application, serious performance bottleneck could arise due to the massive objects creation and long rendering process which could take 8-10 seconds for a page bound to several thousands of data.
3. Heavy backend query.
   
   Most datasource controls introduced in ASP.NET don’t enable paging by default. While it may not be a significant issue in relatively smaller application, it could be a great showstopper for enterprise application with millions to billions worth of data. Non-optimized database query itself could cause performance issues in at least three ways: the heavier workload and resources required to compute the query, huge data transmission from the backend to business layer and ultimately yielding more extensive operation in the UI layer.
4. Poor data processing.Specifically for a scheduling component, poor data processing logic is often a factor that causes performance issue. Scheduler is a unique component that process data in several phases, such as resources categorizing, data grouping and more. Thus, improper data processing logic could result in longer time required to compute the final shape of the data required by the scheduler interface.

The Solution

WebScheduler 3 is strongly focused on addressing performance issues and improving application scalability at the same time. One of the our key goals is to achieve a consistent performance while loading a scheduler bound to thousands of data – for example, 1-2 seconds regardless of the data size.

ViewPort paging was born as the result of our extensive R&D. It is specifically designed for Timeline View (Gantt Chart Style) which makes more sense due to its layout nature that display huge data in a single resource. To completely eliminate the key performance issues discussed above, we also invented three more innovative features that work in conjunction with ViewPort paging. They are event-based client paging, server paging and efficient data categorizing process.

Instead of loading huge data on every data request, ViewPort paging works by loading only a small chunk of data in the first load which seamlessly fills the data based on the available real screen estate. It will load the rest of data on demand as users scroll downward. Also keep in mind that ViewPort intelligently saves a cache of loaded data, so it won’t retrieve the same data twice. The result is maximum performance, increased responsiveness and extremely smooth user experiences.

The ViewPort implementation doesn’t merely handle data paging process, it  also takes account every single feature that associated to it, say, new event creation, recurrence editing, and data drilling. It also flawlessly handles a vast array of complex scenarios such as drag-drop operation across resources and time, multiple selections, views switching, and more.

In addition to ViewPort paging, WebScheduler 3 also implements smart client paging to other views including day view, week view,  split view and all day area view. We also add client paging interface to the details box in month view.

All in all, WebScheduler 3 successfully delivers on its key objectives to redefine a new standard in performance for enterprise-class usage and improving user experiences at the same time. The following chart shows the performance benchmark tested in various browsers.

Our engineers will soon post more coverage on other new exciting features such as customizable time intervals, visible hours, disabled time and more. So stay tuned!

As the word said, pictures worth a million words. Videos worth a zillion. Watch the video below and see the new performance improvements in WebScheduler 3.

You can also experience it yourself by trying our new Blitz rent-a-car reference sample available online.

Learn More

WebScheduler 3 is released – download your 30-day trial copy today to experience the exciting new features for yourself.

More resources on WebScheduler 3 can be found in the following links:

Overview

Performance Benchmark and Comparison

Powerful Client Paging Capability

Top New Features

Top 10 New Features Video

Live Demos

All the best,
Jimmy.