What one can learn about dhtmlxTreeGrid after using it for a couple of weeks? This evaluation version feedback is likely to save your “couple of weeks” or at least it could be of interest for those who consider using this component…

There were a few things we were looking for at the onset of our evaluation (in their order of importance):

1) Performance

The performance was spectacular. Our company actually has a similar solution in-place which utilized HTC files to create tree-grid structures out of <table> elements based on XML streams. We had found that, while it met all requirements, it did so at a heavy cost in performance. We knew that it’s performance could be dramatically improved were we to re-work the DOM structure involved, however due to time constraints we decided to perform an evaluation of your product before beginning such a project. I’m glad we did. The numbers we captured speak for themselves, so I’ll just provide a sample of those:

Nodes	Original Time	New Time	% improvement
1	6.72s	.29s	2317%
10	7.08	.34	2095%
100	11.33	.37	3062%
10,000	(timed out)	1.03	OMG!

The above numbers were captured with the “smartXML” enabled, so I see no reason why the performance gains will not scale higher should we ever need it to (10,000 is our current expected upper-limit.) When all is totaled up, we saw an average performance improvement of nearly 3000%. Everyone (myself included) was much impressed.

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