Cytoscape.js performance very low

[Matthias König]

Hi all,

I have very low performance of Cytoscape.js 2.7 on all Ubuntu systems I was trying (2 desktops & 1 laptop).
It takes >0.5 seconds for node dragging for large networks.

I assume this is some hardware/system setup issue.
- the laptop seems just not to have enough graphics power
- one desktop has an Juniper Pro [Radeon 5750] with fglrx (a bit old graphics card, but 12cores with 32GB Ram)
- one desktop has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan, 6 cores, 16GB Ram but still extremely slow.

Unfortunately I did not find much information about the requirements for Cytoscape.js to have good performance.

Max mentioned:

Hi Matthias -- This seems to be an issue with your machine in particular.  I've tested those demos on several machines on both Mac and openSUSE, and dragging is instant.  I suspect you have either inefficient browser extensions/addons or an old CPU/GPU combo that Chrome and Firefox no longer optimise for.  Maybe you have a different issue, but you may want to at least test with extensions off. -Max

I tried in Chrome & Firefox and both are extremly slow (Chrome a bit faster, but probably due to faster JS), So I assume some required drivers/libraries are missing in the background instead of browser extensions.
Could you give more information which are the core libraries/dependencies/technology which has to be available on a machine to have full performance with cytoscape.js so I could test for the bottleneck ?

the best
Matthias

[Max Franz]

This is probably an issue of graphics card drivers.  Browsers have hardware acceleration for graphics rendering, but it's dependent on the quality of the GPU and its driver.  Systems that have good graphics drivers (Mac, Windows, Linux with Intel graphics) handle dragging instantly, for example.

• I've never had ATI/AMD cards work properly in Linux.  Maybe it's better recently with newer AMD cards and drivers, but I couldn't say.
• Nvidia cards tend to work OK if they're using the proprietary driver, but the driver usually requires an older version of the kernel to work well.  So, for Ubuntu you'd probably have to use LTS.  I know openSUSE Leap (https://software.opensuse.org/421/en) works with Nvidia out of the box fairly well.  I've had lots of config issues with Nvidia on Ubuntu in the past, so I'd recommend just using openSUSE instead (if you can).
  
• I know Intel (CPU embedded) graphics work perfectly in Linux without any fuss or complicated config.  It works well out of the box (and fast).

Graphics card support is a mess on Linux.  It's best to just use an Intel CPU with embedded graphics.