Visualizing 1 trillion data points in real-time with .NET charts

Along with the release of LightningChart .NET v.10.3, we’ve performed rendering and performance tests where we were able to demonstrate how the new line series DigitalLineSeries can visualize 1 trillion data points (1,000,000,000,000) in a real-time scrolling use case.

During the tests, we monitored the frames-per-second (FPS) and observed a high FPS rate of around 60hz. The frames-per-second indicate the times per second that a chart or visualization is updated. The higher the FPS rate, the better but as a reference, a good FPS should be at least 40 or more.

No downsampling was used

Downsampling refers to a technique that contrasts true high-performance as it is implemented when there is a need to render million, billion or more data points. The way how downsampling works is by processing only a limited percentage of data points, for instance, instead of processing 100% of the data points, only 1% is processed. This is a common workaround that eases the resources consumption in the device at the cost of a huge loss of information.

When visualizing 1 trillion data points, every single data point was fully included in the rendering. LightningChart .NET becomes the first charting library capable to visualize several times more data than any other WPF data visualization solution has been able to, using 128 GB RAM.

The next image shows how the DigitalLineSeries is rendered, in a scrolling mode, with 1 trillion data points using 99 different data stream channels simultaneously.

Image: Visualizing 1 trillion data points with the DigitalLineSeries in LightningChart .NET

From the top left corner, you can see different presets available. In terms of the device’s resource consumption, the first preset is the most affordable as it renders 10 million data points using only 1 GB of RAM, a feasible process for even the most low-end devices.

The last available preset corresponds to rendering 1 trillion data points using 128 GB of RAM. This preset is suggested to be used in high-end devices for applications with data-intensive processes.

As visible in the video, at the end of the process, it can be seen the total number of data points that were rendered: 1,109,080,000,000. Over 1 trillion data points are actually visualized.

This test can be replicated by any user with a desktop device capable of handling the test requirements. LightningChart .NET can be downloaded via the free trial version of 30 days. After downloading LightningChart .NET, you’ll get access to the desktop interactive examples where you can search for the DigitalLineSeries and execute the test. The test can be adjusted to your device’s specifications, for instance, visualizing 5 billion data points with 4 GB RAM or 40 billion with 16 GB RAM.