Analysis of the performance difference between server-side and client-side rendering for data visualization in real-time using D3.js

Abstract: Real-time data visualization has the ability to visualize huge amounts of data into understandable graphics and allows for immediate action to be taken on emerging trends. This report aims to compare the performance of real-time server-side and client-side rendering when using the data visualization framework D3.js. To perform this comparison, two applications were constructed to measure the performance of both sides. The results points towards client-side data visualization being faster than server-side with D3.js when using JSDOM at server-side. Therefore we conclude that using the same, or a very similar environment as the applications in this study, client-side data visualization offers better performance. Server-side rendering still offered possibilities for real-time data visualization. However, due to the amount of different influencing factors, we cannot confirm the results to hold up in different situations with other environments than the one that has been used in this study.