Performance Tips and Tricks

RadGridView's API allows you to tweak your application for optimal performance. To get the best out of the control you have to be familiar with the following performance tips.

• RadGridView supports UI virtualization which processes only these visual elements that are loaded in its viewable area. This reduces the memory footprint of the application and speeds up the loading time, thus enhancing the UI performance.

• Placing RadGridView in panels/controls which measure it with infinity disables the UI virtualization mechanism of the control and can greatly impact performance when dealing with large amounts of data. Examples of such panels include ScrollViewer, StackPanel and Grid with a definition with Width/Height set to Auto.

• It is recommended to use the Flat GroupRenderMode. Configuring it involves rendering rows one below the other, which leads to better performance results as opposed to the Nested mode where rows are nested into one another in case nesting is required (grouping or hierarchy). The Flat mode also resolves few rendering issues related to the Nested mode.

• You can also speed up the performance of the control by using the lightweight templates for RadGridView and RadTreeListView. Their main idea is to limit the number of visual elements within the templates of the rows and cells and reduce the amount of time it takes to render them.

• If applicable, you can also turn off the generation of automation peers through the new global AutomationMode property of the AutomationManager. By setting it to Disabled you can greatly improve the performance of the control in certain scenarios.

• Another optimization would be to disable the touch support which will prevent any touch events to be fired.

• When using combobox columns in your RadGridView instance, you can set their IsLightweightModeEnabled property to true which will significantly increase the performance of their lookup logic. Thus, the overall performance of RadGridView will be improved as well.

• When you have child RadGridViews placed in row details or a hierarchy structure, make sure to specify fixed dimensions for them (Height/MaxHeight and Width/MaxWidth). Otherwise their UI virtualization mechanism will be disabled.

• Binding large datasets to the control is a time consuming task that can at times test the users' patience. To provide better user experience RadGridView exposes an IsBusy property through which you can display a busy indicator while the data is loading.

• RadGridView offers excellent integration with the RadDataPager control which can be extremely helpful when working with large collections of data.

• In general, the fastest performance can be achieved if you bind the columns to simple properties because, in this case, lambda expressions are used to get the values. If you bind to nested (sub) properties the control uses bindings to get the values for the cells, which is a much slower operation.

• Set а fixed Width for the columns. Here's a list of the different options when setting the column widths, ordered from best to worst performance.

  • Fixed: Providing a fixed valued (such as 100) for the columns' width increases both horizontal and vertical scrolling performance.
  • Auto: Setting a width size of Auto provides similar, but worse performance.
  • Star: Providing a star-based width results in the slowest performance. This is most noticeable when you have a lot of columns.

• Disable validation in view-mode by setting the ValidatesOnDataErrors property to InEditMode.

• Avoid using converters for the bindings. Calling a converter is a time-consuming operation and this will slow down the performance.

• Avoid applying a RowStyle and/or an AlternateRowStyle which modify the default control template of the GridViewRow element. This will result in a significant performance hit.

• If possible, try not to modify to the default cell templates and avoid overriding them by setting the CellTemplate and CellEditTemplate properties unless really necessary.

• Using the DataLoadMode="Asynchronous" setting of RadGridView is not recommended as it can lead to potential problems.

• It is also recommended to set the IsPropertyChangedAggregationEnabled property to False. Its default value is True, meaning that the occurrence of the PropertyChanged event will be handled on a fixed time period using a DispatcherTimer, which improves the rendering performance when there are a large number of value updates in a short period of time. If this is not the case in your application, you can disable this property so that the resources taken by the aforementioned DispatcherTimer will be freed, thus improving the overall performance of the control.

• Consider switching to RadVirtualGrid. The component lacks some of the RadGridView's features, but it is very fast in comparison.

• An entry point to improve the memory performance is to limit the rows' automation peers cache. To do this, set the MaxCachedPeersSize property of the RadGridViewAutomationPeer. The default value is 10000. Minimizing this value may also resolve some corner cases related to memory leaks.

  Setting the MaxCachedPeersSize property after the data is loaded and the RadGridView automation peer are created

      private void RadGridView_DataLoaded(object sender, EventArgs e) 
      { 
          var peer = RadGridViewAutomationPeer.FromElement((RadGridView)sender) as RadGridViewAutomationPeer; 
          if (peer != null) 
          { 
              peer.MaxCachedPeersSize = 100; 
          } 
      } 
  

  See Also

• UI Virtualization

• Grouping Modes
• Busy Indicator
• RadDataPager Integration
• CellTemplate and CellEditTemplate
• Lightweight Templates
• Managing Data Validation
• UI Automation Support