WPF is Slow

One of the most common complaints from C++ or Windows Forms developers moving to WPF/XAML is the issue of performance. I have worked exclusively and intricately with WPF/XAML for the last 4 years and at times have come across performance issues that put me in a corner, including;

• I needed to enumerate all the alarm and safety devices in an Airports security system inventory. This included fire, smoke, travelator, escalator, motion detection etc. in effect I needed to load up thousands of hardware devices into the WPF application for configuration
• I was dealing with scientific data for DNA, RNA and Protein. Typically you would have an image with an electropherogram attached to it, which contains thousands of points of floating point data. Scientists required the ability to step through several different samples quickly in order to perform analysis on this data.

In both these applications, I ended up having to make significant compromises, including using a Windows Forms chart in the scientific application as loading thousands of floating point data into the plethora of commercial and open source WPF charts we tried was unbearably slow. The Windows Forms chart would render the data in milliseconds, where WPF would take a minimum of 10 or 20 seconds with the same data-set, and given the fact that we needed to extend the chart with additional functionality, it added several months worth of development to alter the Windows Forms chart, where it would have been far easier and less time consuming using WPF.

Staggering

It turns out that peoples cries about the sluggish nature of WPF applications are correct. Microsoft have managed to attain simply staggering performance improvements to the ItemsControl in WPF. An ItemsControl represents a control that can be used to present a collection of items. In WPF, this includes the TreeView, ListBox, ListView and DataGrid controls that are built using ItemsControls.

In .NET 4 (Visual Studio 2010) and previous, a test was conducted where 12 000 items are loaded into an ItemsControl, the results are in the image below

After about 7 minutes, the computer throws an out of memory exception, which I am sure you will agree is absolutely terrible. Microsoft prioritised this issue and in the first iteration managed to increase the total number of items loaded to 200 000 (from 12 000) and load these in 24.5 seconds, an incredible improvement.

The Pièce de résistance is that they continued to try and get this already considerable metric down even further, in the end  they got this down to 2.3 seconds.

If you have a WPF application that is data centric, especially handling thousands of rows of data, then upgrading to .NET 4.5 is an absolute no brainer. WPF is now at least 182 times quicker whilst handling 16 times more data.

It means that WPF is going to be significantly faster with the additional improvements that have been made to virtualisation in ItemsControls and Cold/Warm start-up times for .NET applications in general.