Data Visualization

Caching and Load Times

So... caching! Caching is both your best and worst friend - that's right: it's your frenemy. It can vastly improve speed but also lead to a great deal of confusion when things don't appear to be updating. With that in mind, we were extremely careful when designing the caching component. Whenever viewing the visualizations through the Quicklinks dialog, the last cached time is shown (or "Not cached" if you've disabled the cache for the visualization).

Why cache?

So here's the problem in a nutshell. Imagine your form contains a very large data set: thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of records. When you choose to create a visualizations on that data set, there's actually a tremendous amount of work involved with rendering it: the database query takes a long time to process, and the volume of information passed from the server to the client can be excessively large. Caching can significantly speed this up. Instead of re-running the same long-running query multiple times, it performs it once and caches the result. Then for a set duration, all subsequent queries pull the information from the cache instead of re-running the query.

Every visualization you create through the module has a cache frequency. If you choose, you can set it not to cache at all - but you should only use that when speed

The basic rule of thumb is to just play it by ear. If you find visualizations are taking a long time to load then use the cache.

Google Charts (which is used to render the actual charts) may take a long time to display a visualization if there is a huge amount of data being passed into it. So although caching will improve the speed in some cases, if your visualization contains a lot of data (e.g. you're'graphing the activity count every day for the last 5 years), the visualization will still take time to load. I'm afraid this is unavoidable - so configure your visualizations well!