XAF – Improved ASP.NET UI Performance (coming in v2011 vol 1)

XAF Team Blog
20 April 2011

While working on the XAF v2011 vol 1 release, we have introduced several performance improvements which we think are worthy of being blogged about. Check them out.

First of all, we have substantially reduced the size of generated pages. Second, the lightweight rendering mode is now enabled by default. Although this mode could be enabled manually in XAF applications since v2010 vol 2.4, quite a number of issues has been discovered since then, which practically prevented this mode from being used in production. I am happy to say that we have fixed these issues in XAF v2011 vol 1. We have also reworked XAF internals to speed up page generation on the web server.

So, how much faster your ASP.NET XAF application is going to be? Take a look at the following tables.

Xaf-Performance-2011-1

These are the results of comparing the performance of MainDemo v2010 vol 2 against MainDemo v2011 vol 1. The applications were deployed onto the web server on a remote machine with a local SQL server instance. To make the testing a bit more realistic, we have populated the database with several million rows of sample data. No additional set up has been performed, so MainDemo v2010 vol 2 used classic rendering mode and the v2011 vol 1 version of MainDemo used lightweight rendering.

As you can see with XAF v2011 vol 1, network traffic has decreased roughly two times. Moreover, pages were served by the web server 21% faster in client mode and about 36% faster when server mode was enabled.

We think these are pretty notable results.  We also hope your users will enjoy your application much more after these improvements. What do you think? Please let us know!

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Arjan van Dijk
Arjan van Dijk

This sounds great. In what way are callback panels used? (or not). To what extend are the default templates ajaxified?

20 April 2011
Nate Laff
Nate Laff

Interesting... I don't enable server mode on my web application sense the web server is the same machine as sql server. Should I?

This is great! Really excited to see the UI improvements, too!

20 April 2011
Preetham Chamakura
Preetham Chamakura

This is great... I am assuming XAF 11.1 has IE6 support with all these great UI improvements..

21 April 2011
Roman P (DevExpress)
Roman P (DevExpress)

Thanks for all your comments. We are very glad you liked the improvements!

@Arjan van Dijk

We do not use callback panels. Templates are currently not "ajaxified". However, since we have not yet reached code freeze, it is possible that templates will be "ajaxified" if we resolve the corresponding outstanding issues.

@Nate Laff

It all depends on a particular application and setup. Generally, with XAF v2011 vol 1, if your application works with large amounts of data and does not have Controllers that loop through all the objects in a List View, enabling server mode can help even with a local SQL server instance.

@Preetham Chamakura

Currently we do not support IE6, and XAF v2011 vol 1 will not support it either. If you meant IE9, then, yes, it is supported. Check out this page for a list of supported browsers - devexpress.com/.../Application_Framework|specs

21 April 2011
James Zhong
James Zhong

Really good news for XAF Web UI performance improvement!

I hope the web ui could be Ajax enabled to meet better end users' satisfaction!

Thanks again!

21 April 2011
Simon de Kraa
Simon de Kraa

@Roman

Hopefully there will be more ajaxified in the final release.

Having full page refreshes isn't something that that is expected by our users nowadays.

Thanks for all the efforts being made for this release.

22 April 2011
James Birnie
James Birnie

Sound great DevX!

+1 on the ajax side also, all our web apps have been built this way for several years now and I suspect this is the case for most your customers.

28 April 2011
James Birnie
James Birnie

Ooopsy I just realised that this is XAF-related, so I'm wondering if the "lightweight rendering mode" can be enabled across all controls for a standard ASP.NET app easily?

28 April 2011
Robert Hahn
Robert

wow, great! Looking forward to see some kind of improvements on the WinForms Side.

Especially remote database communication....

29 April 2011
Ron Veerman
Ron Veerman

Great improvements! I'm impressed.

Can't wait to test my projects with this release.

29 April 2011
Dennis (DevExpress)
Dennis Garavsky (DevExpress)
29 April 2011
Dennis (DevExpress)
Dennis Garavsky (DevExpress)

@Robert Hahn:

>>Especially remote database communication....

Could you please elaborate more on this?

Also, did you check the following blogs:

community.devexpress.com/.../xpo-11-1-sneak-peek-wcf-services-for-idatastore.aspx

community.devexpress.com/.../xpo-11-1-sneak-peek-data-caching-improvements.aspx

?

29 April 2011

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