Morioh
Login
dotNET Questions

dotNET Questions

3 years ago

Visualize Time Series Data with μPlot Library

📈 μPlot

A small (< 30 KB min), fast chart for time series, lines, areas, ohlc & bars (MIT Licensed)

Introduction

μPlot is a fast, memory-efficient Canvas 2D-based chart for plotting time series, lines, areas, ohlc & bars; from a cold start it can create an interactive chart containing 150,000 data points in 135ms, scaling linearly at ~25,000 pts/ms. In addition to fast initial render, the zooming and cursor performance is by far the best of any similar charting lib; at < 30 KB, it’s likely the smallest and fastest time series plotter that doesn’t make use of context-limited WebGL shaders or WASM, both of which have much higher startup cost and code size.

166,650 point bench: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/bench/uPlot.html

However, if you’re looking for true real-time 60fps performance with massive datasets, uPlot can only get you so far. WebGL should still be the tool of choice for applications like realtime signal or waveform visualizations: Try danchitnis/webgl-plot, huww98/TimeChart, epezent/implot.

uPlot Chart

Features

Non-Features

In order to stay lean, fast and focused the following features will not be added:

  • No data parsing, aggregation, summation or statistical processing - just do it in advance. e.g. https://simplestatistics.org/, https://www.papaparse.com/
  • No transitions or animations - they’re always pure distractions.
  • No collision avoidance for axis tick labels, so may require manual tweaking of spacing metrics if label customization signficiantly increases default label widths.
  • No stacked series or line smoothing. See links for how these are each terrible at actually communicating information. While neither will be part of the core, uPlot’s API makes it easy to implement both: stacked-series, line-smoothing.
  • No built-in drag scrolling/panning due to ambiguous native zoom/selection behavior. However, this can be added externally via the plugin/hooks API: zoom-wheel, zoom-touch.

Documentation (WIP)

The docs are a perpetual work in progress, it seems. Start with /docs/README.md for a conceptual overview. The full API is further documented via comments in /dist/uPlot.d.ts. Additionally, an ever-expanding collection of runnable /demos covers the vast majority of uPlot’s API.

Performance

Benchmarks done on a ThinkPad T480S:

  • Date: 2020-09-18
  • Windows 10 x64, Chrome 85.0.4183.102 (Official Build) (64-bit)
  • Core i5-8350U @ 1.70GHz, 8GB RAM
  • Intel HD 620 GPU, 2560x1440 res

uPlot Performance

Full size: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/multi-bars.html

Raw data: https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot/blob/master/bench/results.json

lib size done js,rend,paint,sys heap peak,final interact (10s)
uPlot 28 KB 65 ms 99 5 1 67 15 MB 3 MB 198 371 129 237
Chart.js-next 229 KB 235 ms 289 2 1 95 32 MB 20 MB 3604 34 46 6125
LightningChart 931 KB — ms 356 3 1 70 26 MB 20 MB 9114 65 55 272
dygraphs 125 KB 185 ms 260 4 2 171 93 MB 48 MB 2294 241 114 404
CanvasJS 479 KB 323 ms 378 5 1 93 40 MB 25 MB 2173 457 119 397
Flot 494 KB 334 ms 202 7 2 283 24 MB 19 MB —
dvxcharts 369 KB 326 ms 585 34 2 62 62 MB 26 MB 1394 717 204 270
Highcharts 384 KB — ms 748 9 2 75 49 MB 21 MB 2012 725 217 317
Chart.js 245 KB 654 ms 718 4 2 164 101 MB 85 MB 5550 5 7 4020
Plotly.js 3400 KB 465 ms 828 7 1 83 50 MB 28 MB 1507 229 53 177
ECharts 785 KB — ms 718 6 7 1120 116 MB 77 MB 2016 70 25 7856
ApexCharts 460 KB — ms 2137 28 3 73 170 MB 97 MB 2030 220 28 122
ZingChart 857 KB 2535 ms 2711 7 1 66 143 MB 85 MB —
amCharts 1200 KB 5825 ms 7509 47 13 78 256 MB 256 MB 6932 1288 282 512
  • size includes the lib itself plus any dependencies required to render the benchmark, e.g. Moment, jQuery, etc.
  • Flot does not make available any minified assets and all their examples use the uncompressed sources; they also use an uncompressed version of jQuery :/

TODO (all of these use SVG, so performance should be similar to Highcharts):

  • Chartist.js
  • d3-based
    • C3.js
    • dc.js
    • MetricsGraphics
    • rickshaw

Acknowledgements

Download Details:

Author: leeoniya

Demo: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/bench/uPlot.html

Source Code: https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot

#javascript

Visualize Time Series Data with μPlot Library
3.70 GEEK