Performance testing of web-based data visualization

Abstract

Many scientific applications generate massive data that requires visualization. For example, the Nevada Solar Energy-Water-Environmental Nexus project has been generating a large amount of environmental monitoring data in textual format. As the data is available on the web, a web-based visualization tool is desirable for the project rather than a standalone tool. This research analyzes the processing mechanisms of four popular web-based data visualization tools, that is, Google Charts, Flex, OFC, D3, and compares their performances. A standalone visualization tool, JfreeChart, have been also used for comparison. The processing times have been divided into three segments, layout time, data transformation time, and rendering time, and separately measured. The actual temperature data from the Nevada Nexus project has been used for testing in different scales ranging from 100 to 100,000 data points. The result shows that each visualization tool has its own ideal environment.