I've been working for quite a while on a project to display real-time data in a flex chart and just can't seem to 'turn the corner' on it. While the code works, it is plagued by terrible performance and frequently locks up the browser. And I'm wondering if I am just doing something wrong or if there are resources available to navigate out of this quagmire.
The BlazeDS website claims it enables "Real-time server push over standard HTTP", but what is the expected performance for something like this? How much data can it handle? I realize most charts don't require tons of data points, often needing only 10-100 separate sets of data to display. But for small data sets, why not just use standard HTTP and XML? Why bother with BlazeDS? But in my experience, BlazeDS isn't handling large sets of data very well. I am needing to output scatter plots for scientific data so the data sets can be huge. I've plotted over 140K points in some runs. But even when I filter the data and plot around 10K points, I get browser lockup while it loads and it takes 5-10 seconds to produce the chart and lately it has even been crashing on the larger data sets. Is it the conversion from Java objects to Actionscript which is the problem? Am I not using the right channel? I realize this may be too open-ended of a question to get a specific solution, but if anyone knows a book I could buy, or a course available, or a more in-depth forum, please let me know. There just doesn't seem to be much in-depth material available for this functionality right now. And if there are a few standard things to check for when dealing with messaging or just a performant approach to real-time server push in general please share your insights. I am the only developer working with flex at my job and I can tell that people here are skeptical about my choice to make flex the front end for this application. I'm beginning to wonder myself if I have not made the wrong decision. The graphs we produce look great, but in terms of usability, no one would want to use this product in its current state, its way too sluggish and clunky. Sorry this post ended up so long. Thanks for the help the others have offered in the past and if you have any insights into this, I'd sure appreciate hearing from you.
