Testing Out a New Google Visualization
I've been using the Google Visualization AnnotatedTimeLine for nearly the last year. It's very nice, but I've been having a lot more memory issues lately, and using the Google Chrome memory profiling tools, it's pretty clear the vast majority of the memory usage in the effected pages is in JavaScript String objects - and most of those are in the AnnotatedTimeLine. Additionally, it's a Flash component, so with the new advancements with HTML5's Canvas, and the JavaScript-based graphing tools, maybe there would be one that I could use in place of the AnnotatedTimeLine.
Turns out there's one that's very similar. It's called "dygraphs" and is located off the main Visualization Gallery page. It's got a nice feature set, and while it doesn't do the "time sliding" that the AnnotatedTimeLine does, it's got a few nicer things like error bars and built-in moving average and even able to put the legend in a separate div. So I decided to give it a try and see if I would get a better memory profile.
Thankfully, the dygraph takes a Google DataTable, so all I really had to do was remove a few event registrations specific to the AnnotatedTimeLine, the constructor, and comment out a few blocks of code, and I had a functioning replacement page. It wasn't optimized for all the features and fonts, etc. but it was working.
Sweet.
I then looked at the memory usage of the two pages in the Google Chrome Task Manager and while the AnnotatedTimeLine version of the page was in the 58 MB range, the dygraph version of the page was on the high-side of 200 MB - it was at least a factor of four.
OK... nice test, but I'll stick with the AnnotatedTimeLine for now.
Yikes!