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The charts below (created with FlexJS Chart package) show the difference between the optimized (orange) and regular (red) chart components; shorter bars are faster. The performance data were gather from two FlexJS LineCharts of a sine wave: one with optimized components and one without. The charts used BoxItemRenderers for each point plotted along with a LineSegmentItemRenderer to display the line connecting the points. The vertical axis is the average of ten runs in milliseconds.
source: flex-asjs/examples/ChartExample using TestModel and SpeedResultsView.
The results show that the best performance comes from the optimized chart components with the difference most notable in the JavaScript version; the Flash versions out performed the JavaScript versions every time. Another factor to consider is that Flash is better at handling larger data sets. Extrapolating the performance data, you can see what the increasing the size of the data increases the time on JavaScript significantly over Flash. In fact, running charts using ten thousand points often caused the browsers to either stop or pause and notify the user that the script was taking too long. Some pseudo-threading techniques could help the perceived performance, but overall, Flash is better at handling large data.
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