Multiple Chart performance in WPF slows down considerably when mouse is moved

Hi Brian, I just got around to testing this today. So sorry for the delay … I was able to reproduce your 20 FPS in the provided test app.

OK.

If you REMOVE the MaxFrameRate binding entirely (or set it to null), and set RenderPriority = Normal, I now get >40 FPS. This happens whether I move the mouse or not. The chart appears to render entirely smoothly.

Background: Internally to SciChart there are a few ways we handle the render loop. Setting MaxFrameRate creates a DispatcherTimer with a certain priority (below that of mouse input) and with a timer interval of 1/MaxFrameRate. That means that is the maximum you will get. Its likely you won’t go above it, because if the timer fires and the chart is not ready to draw, you end up waiting momentarily before the next timer event. Similarly once you have set MaxFrameRate, RenderPriority is ignored.

Our advice on use of MaxFrameRate and RenderPriority

1. Leave SciChartSurface.RenderPriority to the default value of normal, unless
2. You experience stutterring in the handling of mouse on the UI, or other controls like buttons fail to operate, then set SciChartSurface.RenderPriority to Low.
3. MaxFrameRate can be used as an alternative to Low or if you want to set framerate very low, to 1Hz say, for a strip chart.

I don’t observe any stuttering of the UI Controls (buttons, combo boxes) in your app when RenderPriority is normal, so I say leave it.

Now the question for you is – is that performance enough? Or did you want us to debug it further and see if there are any gains to be made?

Best regards,
Andrew

Hi Brian,

Thanks for getting in touch. We have a similar example called “50-Channel EEG” in the Examples Suite. It renders 50 charts with 1000 points each, updating in real-time. May I ask you to try it? How does the example perform on your PC?

Could you please also tell us how often do you update the chart? How many points per update?

Concerning CursorModifier usage, this will slow down the chart indeed. The CursorModifier performs hit-test at every update, plus shows/hides tooltips and axis lables, which are UI elements. These are quite slow to render. So if you switch them of setting ShowTooltip to False, performance of the CursorModifier should improve.

Please let us know about your findings,

Best regards,
Yuriy

Hi Yuriy,

Thank you for the quick reply!

I took a look at the 50-Channel EEG and am surprised that it performs well on my machine. I’ve reduced the number of charts to 10 and display the SciChartPerformanceOverlay and it says that all 10 charts are performing like champs, updating at 30+ FPS regardless of my mouse movements.

There is one concern, though, and that is the CompositionTarget also seems to be less than 100 FPS which is much lower than I’ve seen in my own app. That being said, the performance seems much better than my own app and I’m at a loss for what exactly I’m doing wrong.

To answer your questions, everything is configurable… but by default:
1. My app updates the chart every 40ms.
2. My chart is holding 5 seconds of data in 1000 points, so 200 points per second. The number of points being updated is calculated based on update timing but is ~8 points per update.

Also, not sure where I should set ShowTooltip = false or find the CursorModifier. I couldn’t find any such code in the EEG example so if it’s off by default, I haven’t turned it on.

I’ve attached a zip file containing a sample app I’m using to try to find the best performance for my situation. It’s been modified a lot for configuration/experimentation so please keep that in mind. Hope it makes sense.

I’ve spent the day trying to glean what the actual difference is between your 50-EEG app and this and not sure what could be the issue. From what I can see, there’s a few differences:

1. Use of Timer instead of Task
2. HighSpeedRenderSurface instead of DirectX
3. RenderPriority is Normal instead of the recommended Low
4. I’m using Update to keep my XyDataSeries sorted, which is supposed to improve performance
5. I’m using SuspendUpdates() to try to prevent too much contention on UI thread

I’ve played with each of these things today and nothing seems to make a difference.

The EEG demo gives me hope that 30FPS for multiple charts is a possibility. Now I just need to figure out how to make that happen. If you could take a look at the attached app and let me know if you seen anything obviously wrong, I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks again for the help!

Hi Andrew,

[PASTED FROM ABOVE DUE TO FORMATTING]

Thanks for your detailed reply. I’ve a few comments.

Just to give an idea of our goals –> our target is to have 48 charts on a single screen (3 charts per unit with a max of 16 units per screen). Each unit updates at ~250pts / second and we’ll show 8 seconds worth of data (ie. ~2000 pts/chart).

Now, about your first point of 3 charts for every chart due to overlay:

First, the overlays that I do have in my sample have the ChartsVisibility property set to Collapsed, so the SciChart surface shouldn’t actually be rendering those, should they? This means for 10 charts, I only have 10 charts rendered, not 30. Of course they are updating the overlay data to get the FPS, but I would hope the collapsed charts do not to affect anything.

Second, even when the whole Overlay is Collapsed, the slowdown occurs. I assume the very existence of the overlays is hooking into the CompositionTarget.Rendering, as you’ve described, even when Collapsed. This, combined with the point above, is making these Overlays expensive.

I did find this question from 2 years ago:
https://www.scichart.com/questions/question/comparing-performance-for-a-fifo-chart-shows-direct3-slowest-and-high-quality-renderer-fastest-1

"We’re still investigating why this is, but we believe there is some contention between the rendering (UI) thread and the appending (DataSeries.Append) thread."

So it’s possible that the overlay is doing DataSeries.Append regardless of if the actual chart is visible or not.

To try to get around this issue but also get an idea of SciChart FPS vs Composition FPS, I tried to add a single SciChartPerformanceOverlay in the code behind and have it attach to only the first ChartControl. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to pick up the TargetSurface properly. I can see the CompositionTaget and the Chart Stats (point count) properly, but the SciChartSurface is always infinite.

The code I’m using is this:

    private static object _overlaySyncLock = new object();
    private static bool _overlayCreated = false;
    private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        if (!_overlayCreated)
        {
            lock (_overlaySyncLock)
            {
                SciChartPerformanceOverlay overlay = new SciChartPerformanceOverlay()
                {
                    ChartsVisibility = Visibility.Collapsed,
                    TargetSurface = sciChartSurface, // <-- Is this correct?
                    Margin = new Thickness(4),
                    Background = Brushes.Black,
                    Foreground = Brushes.AliceBlue
                };

                GridForOverlay.Children.Add(overlay); // This is an empty grid that positions the overlay where I'd like

                _overlayCreated = true;
            }
        }
    }

Am I doing something wrong here?

Re: Update, it seems like the charts of the overlay are not at fault and it’s actually the TextBlock rendering the FPS. Is there any way to set the update speed of the Overlay? If it updated a few times a second or less, that’d be fine for diagnostics and should remove this bottleneck. A MaxFrameRate like the SciChartSurface might be useful. Just a thought.

Now, all that being said, if I remove the overlays it does improve performance but then if I increase the number of charts, the stuttering does come back. I did find that setting RenderPriority to Normal from Low makes this better, but a comment elsewhere in these forums said Low is better to keep UI snappy. What do you think?

I’m also wondering why it is that the mouse movement is what causes the stuttering at all, even without mouse events or modifiers? Can you shed some light on why the mouse movement is a trigger for stuttering?

Finally, the part that puzzles me most is that when the Overlays are there, the SciChartSurface FPS is much lower than the CompositionTarget. The frame rate is much lower than the expected MaxFrameRate of 30. Is there something else throttling it to less than MaxFrameRate?

Sorry for the long reply. I’m enjoying the ease of SciChart API’s and want to figure out/understand this last performance item.

Thanks for all the help! It’s very insightful!

Brian

Hi again Andrew,

Sorry for the delay in replying but things got busy elsewhere. I haven’t forgotten you! And I definitely agree that chart performance is a complex beast! =)

As an update, I’ve added my own frame counter with the ideas you’ve given and have included that in the sample app I’ve attached to this message.

To see the issue, the settings I’ve enabled seem to work on my PC. When you first push the “Start” button, it should run with SC.FPS > 20. Moving the mouse over the window for an extended period of time brings the FPS down considerably (I’ve seen it as low as 12). As soon as I stop moving the mouse, it goes up above 20 again.

Now, I’ve tried to hook up controls to all the performance-related items I can think of for tweaking. Some of these things seem a bit hacky but seem to work.

Two things I’ve noted are
1. RenderPriority cannot be DataBound. To get around this, I’ve given my VM a reference to the SciChartSurface itself. This seems OK but not 100% (setting to Manual cannot be undone).

1. The MaxFrameRate binding seems to not work in Designer, but seems to work at Runtime. This is an interesting one because I’m not sure it’s used.
   a) For Normal and Low RenderPriority, no matter what I set the Max to, it’s never hit. If I set it to 30, I see FPS of ~20. If I set it to 20, it drops to ~15. Now this could just be my method of calculating is not exact…
   b) For Immediate RenderPriority it goes beyond the Max (set it to 30 and it runs at 50). If my method of calculation results in too low a number, this should be impossible, shouldn’t it?

In any case, I only mention those as observations in case my app itself is causing some issue.

If you have any questions about the app, please let me know. Otherwise, I’m eager to hear your take on what I’m observing.

Thanks again,
Brian