JMP® Live and interactive HTML performance improvements in JMP® 18

PaulSpychala

There are many different working pieces to consider when you look at performance in JMP Live and interactive HTML. Reports with large data sets and complicated graphs can be costly just to send over a network. Other times, a lot of data must be processed to make summary calculations. Drawing millions of markers, lines, and other shapes can also stress a machine.

So what does this mean when publishing a control chart with a large data set on JMP Live? How much time should this graph take to load and draw on the screen? If it’s slow, what can be done to make it load faster? What if I don’t want to change my chart, but it is still too slow?

At JMP, we’ve heard our users and have made significant performance improvements in JMP 18. Using the performance lessons, tools, and processes implemented in JMP 17, we have further moved the bar in JMP 18.

Control charts

Let’s continue with the control chart example, since common charts are often used on JMP Live. A very simple control chart with a modest data table of 366,644 rows may contain many subgroups. In this example, the chart looks like this:

We can see that the chart contains many lines and points; on JMP 17, opening this report was very slow. On my laptop, it took 217 seconds to open the report, during which time several warnings appeared to say that the website was taking a long time to load and to ask if it should stop. On JMP 18, opening this report now takes 10 seconds – a whopping 95.4% load time decrease or a 21.7x improvement.

Graph Builder line charts

Let’s stress line charts in Graph Builder next by using the Overlay role to create a lot of lines of many different colors.

Now while this may not be a type of chart that many people build, it will help us stress the drawing and parsing algorithms. Loading this report on JMP 17 took about 27 seconds and often stressed memory usage to 297 MB. Loading this report on JMP 18 took about 13 seconds and used 186 MB of memory, representing a 51.9% load time decrease (or 2.1x improvement) and 37% decrease in memory usage.

Graph Builder area charts

Next, let’s look at a large table of 500k rows of random data to make an area chart in Graph Builder.

This is another stress test for the way to draw areas and calculate statistics. Opening the report from JMP 17 took about 210 seconds, a really long time to wait. On the other hand, opening the report from JMP 18 takes about 4 seconds, which is a decrease in load time of 98%, which translates to a 52.5x speed improvement!

Graph Builder tree maps

Next up are tree maps with a large data table of 1.2 million rows of random values.

Loading up the tree map from JMP 17 took about 8.5 seconds, while opening the same report from JMP 18 takes about 2.1 seconds. That’s an initial load time decrease of 75%, or a 4x performance improvement.

Graph Builder heat maps

What about a heat map? This wafer heat map report has a data table of 414k rows.

Even though this is a large and busy report, the load times were not as bad as some of the earlier test cases. Exported from JMP 17, opening the report took 14.7 seconds, while opening the same report exported from JMP 18 takes about 4.4 seconds. That is an initial load time decrease of 70%, or a 3.3x performance increase.

Graph Builder points

The last test looks at points with a summary of a data table consisting of 1.2 million rows.

We did not do as much work with points as other segments, so performance will reflect that. Instead, this report highlights many of the other improvements we did in calculations and parsing, as well as general improvements to the entire report stack. Loading the report exported from JMP 17 took about 2.9 seconds vs. roughly 2.4 seconds loading a report exported from JMP 18. So, an initial load time decrease of 17% or a 1.2x performance increase. While you may first be underwhelmed by these numbers, remember, it’s still a 20% improvement, which we believe will always be welcomed.

Tables

Back in 2013, an issue was raised regarding reports that contained large amounts of data in tables, thus causing the browsers to hang. A quick fix was made: simply limit the number of rows to 1,000, since reports with large tables are rare. However, we heard from customers that they wanted to see the entire data set.

In JMP 18.0, users can now navigate the table more efficiently with the addition of pagination controls to view the entire table records. Users can navigate with the following controls:

Control	Action
\|<	Navigating to the first page.
<	Navigates to the previous page.
>	Navigates to the next page.
>\|	Navigates to the last page.
TextBox	Navigates to the entered page number.
n of N	Gives the information about the current page (n) and the total number of pages (N).