50,000? LOL. ;-) On a more serious note, I have to agree with Fotis and Ricky that 50K data points is too many, both from a (Flash 9 VM at least) performance perspective and probably also from an Information Visualization perspective (unless, maybe, your users have 300 dpi monitors).
There are several standard interaction design and information visualization techniques which may be useful to you . . . 1) Aggregation (as already suggested, take 'N' data points, average them, and then only display the average value). 2) Filtering (by sliders on an axis, by date/time, by structured or open-ended queries, ...) 3) Progressive rendering (sample the entire data set at intervals of 'N', render those points, then go back and get the data which is mid-point between the original points, add the new points to the curve, repeat until desired resolution obtained--or on user demand) 4) Non-linear zooming (like idea 1), but allow user to zoom in on a section of the curve, when they do, add the additional data points to the curve for the zoomed-in region) On a more pragmatic note, you certainly _can_ plot more than 2,000 points. For example, I've personally used Flex to create charts with over 14,000 points in them, so I know that at least that number is definitely *possible*. However, the overall rendering time was (as I recall) over 3 minutes long. More troubling was the fact that the entire Flex UI become very sluggish once a chart that large was displayed. I've seen good chart rendering speed ( ~= 2S ) and no UI sluggishness, up to about 1500 points. I've also been able to render up to 6,000 points, but it took about 10S for the rendering and the UI started to become sluggish. From your posting, it sounds like you're not seeing those rendering speeds. I'd recommend that you experiment with how you are using the charting objects/API. My experience was that I was able to see some very noticeable speed-ups simply be optimizing how I called the charting API (especially w.r.t. how I loaded the series data). In particular, if your charts are interactive, try to cache anything you can that doesn't necessarily change during an interaction (i.e., axis objects). Last thought: the new Flash 10 VM (Astro) has support for larger bitmaps and also can now do hardware-based rendering, apparently. I haven't tried either of those features myself, but using the v10 VM _might_ be another way to get a performance boost, etc. Good luck! Jim --- In flexcoders@yahoogroups.com, "Mark Easton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi, > > It appears that Flex Charts cannot handle generating charts with large > DataSets. We tried with 50,000 data points and it thrashed away without > producing a result after 6 minutes. It was able to plot 2,000 points in > about 25 seconds. > > What is the recommended approach for creating charts from large data sets. > The best I can think of is to write some code that will reduce the data set > in size yet still provide enough data to represent the graph accurately. > > Thoughts? > > Ta. > Mark >
