Slow.....

[zam6ak]

I have a report which uses plain HTML table and handlebars.
Report has 8000+ rows. No scripts of any kind - just pure HTML to PDF.

With phantomjs it takes about 15 seconds to render.
I tried using electron recipe with 'electron-ipc' and 'electron-server' strategy and
the same report takes 40+ seconds to render....

Any idea why would it be that much slower?

[bjrmatos]

@zam6ak hmmm i have experienced slow rendering on windows machines, can you upload a working demo on a repository for me? it will help me to figure out why it is slow.

[zam6ak]

Unfortunately I can't share the data....
You can try to generate fake data using https://www.mockaroo.com/
As for the template - it is just handlebars with HTML table....

[pofider]

Yes electron seems to be really slower (maybe only in some cases), but I'm not sure if there is something we can do about it. The slowdown likely comes from deep down somewhere in chromium codebase.

@bjrmatos if you have any clue what to improve, you can compare the speed on this simple example
https://playground.jsreport.net/studio/workspace/ryQffOb3/4

[bjrmatos]

@pofider thnk you for the example, it will help me to figure out!

[bjrmatos]

interesting, using https://playground.jsreport.net/studio/workspace/ryQffOb3/4 my numbers on OSX are:

phantomjs (using phantom-serverstrategy)
114 pages
first render -> 29941 seconds
second render -> 28805 seconds

electron (using electron-serverstrategy)
107 pages
first render -> 11489 seconds
second render -> 11208 seconds

phantomjs (using dedicated-processstrategy)
114 pages
1rst -> 30198 seconds
2rst -> 29898 seconds

electron (using dedicated-processstrategy)
107 pages
1rst -> 11600 seconds
2rst -> 11344 seconds

i need to get a windows machine to investigate more, but yeah it is slow on windows 😆

[notatestuser]

I can't get this package to work at all on Windows. I always end up with a Error: Timeout when executing in electron regardless of the strategy I choose. Do you know why this might be?

[zam6ak]

did you do:
npm install electron-prebuilt --save

[notatestuser]

I did, yes.

[notatestuser]

This is when running under iisnode. When ran directly it works! I'll consider this a file access permission issue.

[pofider]

You can try to change this in the config :

electron: { 
  strategy: 'dedicated-process',
}

However I would recommend avoid using iisnode and rather use iis as reverse proxy to a windows service running jsreport. If you are not limited by infrastructure rules of course..

[bjrmatos]

@notatestuser we ( @pofider and I ) have tested jsreport-electron-pdf on windows with iisnode and it causes too much troubles, seems like electron on iisnode doesn't work well :( you can try with @pofider 's recomendations.

[notatestuser]

Indeed. I've tried all the strategies without any luck. Interestingly though phantomjs is fine, even with a prebuilt binary downloaded into node_modules. I'd really like to be able to render in electron!

[notatestuser]

I've opened bjrmatos/electron-workers#263 for the iisnode issue.