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Comment by 1971genocide | Hacker News Reader

1971genocide·

nvd3.js is awesome. However It always crashes for very large dataset. I had to reduce my dataset size for nvd3.js to not crash, however programs like MATLAB has no problem visualising really large dataset where you can zoom to individual data point. Its in my TODO list to make nvd3.js handle large data set so that it can compete with MATLAB/Python.

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Just happen to come by this today: http://i.imgur.com/5zE08DX.png

MATLAB gets more hate then it deserves. Do you know some of the language stuff in MATLAB are being adopted in the next iterating of javascript ? MATLAB has amazing consistency and a really good learning tool. It is really good for fast prototyping for numerical algorithms, its just very old.

Do you have any suggestions for alternatives for large datasets? I currently use Highstock, but it's pretty bad around ~100,000 individual points.

With those many points you'll probably need something that makes use of HTML Canvas, and not SVG which slows down if you plot that many elements.

Do you happen to have any recommendations?

For dense data like that, you might give dygraphs a try.

For a simple scatterplot with many points I would probably simply use Canvas directly, and perhaps borrow elements from D3 like d3.scale to plot the axis labels. It is possible to use Canvas underneath to plot the 100,000 points, and SVG on top for other stuff like tooltips and brush selecting.

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