Telerik Reports vs Crystal Reports - performance

[Jose]

Hi All,

Having used Crystal Reports VS for years, we recently decided to move to Telerik Reports, however I can't say I am overly impressed with the performance and memory usage!!

I designed a rather simplistic report in both Crystal and Telerik, pushed the same data through (125000 rows / 10 columns) with no calculated formulas, conditional formatting, or images, and results are as follows:

Crystal to PDF = 70 seconds (400MB ram usage)

Telerik to PDF = 180 seconds (1800MB ram usage) with FontEmbedding set to None. If on SubSet, file size will grow from 5MB to 60MB!!

Telerik to XLSX = 380 seconds!

Is Crystal Reports really that well optimized for exporting to PDF! Or is Telerik Reports really that bad??

Looks like we will have to run two sets of reports now or look at alternatives!

Both reports are using ObjectDataSource with data retrieved from a stored procedure and outputs to a DataTable. Data retrieval on both takes approximately 30 seconds, with the rest on rendering! Telerik report is not opened in a Viewer, but rendered directly to PDF, same with the Crystal Report. 

Any tips or suggestions greatly appreciated, but I don't have much faith that it will improve much :(

Cheers

Joe

[Jose]

Some more details.

If I create an XLSX file using the RadSpreadProcessing, I get it down to 50 seconds. Using RadSpreadStreamProcessing it goes even quicker at 35 seconds!!

Would have been awesome if Telerik Reports used RadSpread or RadSpreasStream to generate the XLSX files :)

[Todor]

Generally, we have plans for optimizing the performance of our product. We cannot promise this for the current year though as we have tasks with higher priority.

Thank you for sharing your test results and for the suggestion of utilizing the Telerik spread processing. We will consider this possibility in the future.

[Todor]

Hi Joe,

Indeed, when it comes to basic reports dumping the data in a particular format, the performance of our Reporting tool is not optimal. The Crystal Reports engine runs on native code and obviously, it does better for basic tasks. We are aware of this. However, we have greater flexibility in terms of customization using the reports API and this comes at a cost. Our Reporting tool is designed mainly with printing in mind, and our engine tries to keep the final layout of the report as close as possible to the designed one.

I suggest the Telerik reporting RAM usage forum thread for more explanations and links to resources regarding the performance and possible optimizations.

Regards,
Todor
Progress Telerik