Is DevExpress for ASP.NET fast enough

Question

My question is simple and straight forward - Is DevExpress fast enough for real world web application. We're using DevExpress in our company to build a CRM for a client and every page has got lots of controls and its damn slow. On my development server it takes 10sec for a page with around 20 controls to load. Is this good or bad? And can you guys point me to a real life DevExpress application except the ones given on the case study section.

Answer 1

Hi Soham,

They are fast enough. The DevExpress website is created using DevExpress controls and from my point of view, it works fast enough. To be able to help you improve performance, we need to know which controls are used on slow pages, how many data is shown simultaneously, which browsers you used to test, and finally the version of DevExpress controls you are using.

Answer 2

That's bad, but I wouldn't point straight at the DevExpress controls when assigning blame - I'd be running a profiler against my code to work out where the issue really is.

Answer 3

Soham,

As a general rule, when designing for the web, try to keep your pages light so they can run faster. For example, do you absolutely need 20 controls on one page?

And if they do not need any special functionality then you can use the native rendering.

Also, check out my article on the DevExpress web.config settings to improve performance.

Btw, I work for DevExpress. :)

Answer 4

I have no DevExpress experience, but you may also want to check out Improving Asp.net performance. It might help out as well.

Answer 5

I just started a new web project using DevExpress and I will be tracking this question.

Soham, please provide more details to help me. I am going to be using ASPxperience Suite v2010 vol 1.5. Specifically, I have plans to use the tree view and menu controls. I want to use their ASPxGridView, but it is pretty complex and I haven't committed the time to understand it.

Have you used SQLProfiler yet on your data code? I have found most of my time delays come from me calling to open a database connection too many times or getting data that I already have. There was a time during a page that I got a dataset 6 times when it was static data. SQLProfiler will save you!

Good luck and please post some more details.

Answer 6

Once I tried to use a simple DateEdit and 3 round panels, which increased the size of the page(including resources) from 400KB to 1.2KB(compared the size using Opera). As a result, when the users tried to enter to that size for the first time, it took them around two minutes to load a page(without considering timeout problems). They were seriously pissed off, so we had to remove all those controls. When we used JQuery UI, we got a handsome UI but the size was around 450KB. We also used Google's CDN which improved the performance a lot.

So, the answer to your question is : if your users don't have bandwidth problem, then you can use DevExpress's control. In that case it won't cause any problem. But if the user's bandwidth is small, then they are going to be seriously pissed off. I am saying this from my experience.

Have a look at this question : Can Jquery build DevExpress-like UI

Also if you want to look at the site that I was talking about, go here : Globe Securities Limited, though I am afraid you won't be able to see the JQuery UI plugins without logging in. But look at the left menu there, we tried to build it using DevExpress's XtraMenu(or something like that, I don't exactly remember the control's name). The result was disastrous.