Smallworld – Cliffhanger Solutions

Back in 2016 we reported our initial findings with Smallworld v5 and addressed our concerns about performance. The main issue was startup performance and (map) rendering performance. After several (minor) releases from GE and a few more upgrade projects under our belt, here are our updated findings:

Startup performance, while still slower than version 4, is about 40% faster than in the initial 5.0 release. This update is part improvements from GE, and part memory and other settings. Since startup typically only takes place a few times a day, this has become a workable situation.

On (map) rendering performance, we found that area style hashing has a huge impact on performance. While not ideal, after we updated the styles, map rendering became much faster, slightly slower than version 4, but much faster than our initial version 5:

Map Rendering example
Smallworld 4.3 -> 1.5s
Smallworld 5.0 -> 10s
Smallworld 5.2 -> 2s

To recap, focus on the following areas to gain performance improvements:

Style hashing
Java graphic rendering
Memory settings

Feel free to contact us to evaluate your installation. Do you need help upgrading to Smallworld 5 or need help tweaking the performance of your existing applications? We have a tool that will help you find out what parts of your Smallworld application are used the most frequently, which will help you focus on specific areas of your application. More details here: Overwhelmed upgrading to Smallworld 5 or need Insight and Analyze Smallworld usage?

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