A performance investigation into JavaScript visualization libraries with the focus on render time and memory usage : A performance measurement of different libraries and statistical charts

Abstract: Visualizing data is important to make it easier to understand. Due to the common accessibility and the popularity of the web, a growth within web-based visualization is seen. One common and easy way to do this is by using an already implemented JavaScript library. When developing such a website some important properties to keep in mind are the render time and the memory usage. This study measured both the render time with different sizes of the dataset, and the render time when rendering different number of charts with the same dataset size. The memory usage was also measured with different sizes of the dataset. Six libraries were chosen to be included inthis study: D3, Echarts, CanvasJS, Chartist, Highcharts, and Plotly. An experiment has been performed to test the libraries render times and memory usage. The results of the experiment show that D3 has the overall lowest render times whilst CanvasJS had the lowest memory usage.