You will need to know how KeyLines performs.

This demo is designed for you to test its performance on your target hardware, browser and OS combination.

There are two main ways of measuring performance: frame rate and running layouts.

Frame Rate

The frame rate is the number of frames the browser is able to render per second. It is a critical measure of the responsiveness of an application from a user's perspective.

Browsers typically 'cap' their frame rates at 60 frames a second, so KeyLines can't draw faster than that. At sixty frames a second users cannot perceive individual frames and the experience is smooth. If the frame rate drops below 5 then users will start to complain when they are performing interactive tasks such as dragging nodes or selecting them.

The KeyLines' frame rate is roughly linear with the number of items drawn. I.e., drawing twice the number of items will typically halve the frame rate.

Layouts

KeyLines layouts are very fast, out-performing open source alternatives.

The demo uses our ‘organic’ layout, which has excellent performance on large datasets.

What happens when KeyLines isn't fast enough?

In general your users will struggle to comprehend networks of thousands of nodes and links, so sometimes it is worth thinking about things from their perspective and designing to that.

There are two basic techniques to get around this problem: filtering the network, and aggregating nodes together.

For more details, see Performance.