Lets talk about rendering performance

Hello. Our company distributes a vertical market accounting app which we've migrated from Crystal Reports to the WinForms ReportViewer. Our installed base is around 6,000 end users. We've found the viewer to be a solid product and we're pleased with the functionality and stability.

That said, we may be forced to abandon reporting services for some applications due to performance issues. As an example, we have a report that processes 10,000 rows and perhaps 20 columns. On a 3 GHz machine with 2GB RAM, it takes 40 seconds to render the report (not counting query time). In addition, ReportViewer consumes approx 400MB of memory for this process (after garbage collection). These results won't cut it when a user is waiting for real-time output.

As a comparison, Crystal Reports would be expected to render this amount of data in perhaps 2 seconds with low memory usage. 10,000 rows isn't all that much, even if we are doing extensive grouping.

The tabular data stream coming back from SQL Server is approx 3MB. This means the ReportViewer is using over 100x the memory required to represent the data. In addition, rendering processing consumes 600,000 clock cycles per field.

One interesting item of note: Adding columns to the query significantly increases rendering time whether or not the columns are referenced in the report.

We've heard rumblings about increased performance and reduced memory usage in future versions of Reporting Services. If this is 6 months away, we can wait. If we're waiting for Katmai, we may need to look at alternatives.

For a lot of reasons, we would like to stay with SSRS. What you've done is really quite amazing. We just need it to go faster.

What advice can you give us about how to proceed We need some answers.

Thanks!

Jon

(engineeringproblem -insert symbol here- gmail.com)

(p.s. I've previously posted under "Jon M.", but have switched passport accounts)

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Lets talk about rendering performance

freeflyr
I'm curious if there's anything in VS 2005 SP1 that affects this. If someone on the SSRS team could let me know, it would save us a day of setting up a VM, installing, extracting the DLLs and testing.

Thanks!
AlexBB
The report view controls are shipped as part of VS.
LezWilliams
Fang Wang,

Thanks - that's very helpful information. We'll be on the lookout for the next version of Visual Studio to help us with our performance issues.

Thanks again!

Jon
Matthew Roper
Yes if you are using local mode in the controls. If you are using server mode, you'd also need to have the new version of the report server to get the perf improvement.
cplusplus1
Robert,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, our app needs to be able to generate lengthy (100+ page) output. All possible aggregation is done in the query. The data is not filtered at all in the report.

We are using tables. Our grouping is around 8 levels deep. We're an ISV and our reports need to satisfy many different configurations of client data, which leads to lots of conditional suppression, etc. We're not using subreports. We tried removing items from the report (fields, grouping, etc.) and measuring speed. Probably tried 25 different combinations. Oddly, rendering time was roughly proportional to the "complexity" of the report. Unfortunately, this means there's no silver bullet to speed this up.

> One interesting item of note: Adding columns to the query significantly increases rendering time whether or not the columns are referenced in the report.

We're factoring out query time when figuring performance. If we select additional columns, but don't use them in the report, rendering performance (as separate from query performance) slows considerably. e.g.:

SELECT RealData1, RealData2, Dummy1=0, Dummy2=0 FROM ...

Fang Wang,

Thanks for responding. Sounds like it's an acknowledged problem, with a fix on the way. In order to help us guess at a timeframe, could you give some insight as to whether the report viewer controls are maintained by the SQL team or the Visual Studio team i.e. which product should we be waiting on

Thanks again to the both of you for responding!
Santhosh Pallikara
Fang Wang,

Thanks - we're using local mode exclusively, so rendering performance shouldn't depend on anything but the local DLLs.

Jon
dealwi8me

This thread has multiple unrelated topics, so let's start with the initial posting about performance by "SSRS Jon" who started this thread.

I would like to better understand your scenario. Are you showing all the 10000 rows in the report (e.g. with 50 rows per page, you end up having 200 pages) If you just show aggregations, have you looked into pre-aggregating the data already in the query

What exactly do you mean with "extensive grouping" Are you using matrix or tables in the report Can you post the RDL(C) file
Are you filtering data already in the query or in the report through dataset or group filters

> One interesting item of note: Adding columns to the query significantly increases rendering time whether or not the columns are referenced in the report.
It is probably not rendering time, but rather data retrieval time - although it should not be a significant increase. SSRS creates a full data snapshot to ensure data consistency - so having more columns results in a higher data volume.

-- Robert
ackermsb

We are running into the same issue trying to render the report directly in excel. If the file size is more than 5MB it kind of freezes the app completely and for files about 10mb (about 10,000 rows) it crashes. Again everything else is really good. Is there any solutions available yet

Most of our reports have summary and detail sections..the detail sections consist of approx 16-22 columns

Thanks,

Sanjay
jschroeder
Like Jon mentioned, we are aware of the performance problems in the Winform control and Excel renderer. We are working on improving the performance, as well as changing the strategy of creating the full snapshot. This is for the next major release. In VS 2005 SP1, there will not be any significant change in terms of performance. If you'd like to look into ways to optimize it in 2005, the questions Robert asked above would be good places to start with.
Ritesh305
bumping this topic up also

we also have incounterd performence issuse

but what hurts us more are bugs

such as the link bug (trying to open url in a new window using target _top works fine on first page but when moving to a new page it opens in same window as the report viewer)

anything to do with rtl languages have huge number of bugs alignment issues when assigning sort to a textbox then it suddenly becomes align to the left (even thouh its align to the right and rtl on properties)

also cant spread the report viwer on full page cuaz if i do and user sort then we lose the toolbar menu of the report viewer

our version is webform reportviewer

if you could pls just announce when will a new version is expected to be released even an estimate will be good

thanks

shai
Ariel S
could i also get an answer for my issuse in this thread regarding the bugs and updates
matthew lyden
Bump...
PaulDev
Bump. Would be nice to see some comment on this issue as it affects the viability of SSRS for certain applications...
JC Carmo
bumping this up...

can we got an asnwer any kind of an answer

even a "we dont know"

just somthing...
Lets talk about rendering performance

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