Is DevExpress for ASP.NET fast enough

Question

My question is simple and straightforward - is DevExpress enough for a real world web application. We use DevExpress in our company to create CRM for the client, and there are many controls on every page, and it’s damn slow. On my development server, it takes 10 seconds to load a page with 20 controls. Is it good or bad? And can you guys point me to the real DevExpress application, with the exception of those listed in the case studies section.

Answer 1

They are fast enough. The DevExpress website was created using DevExpress controls, and from my point of view it works quite fast. To be able to help you improve performance, we need to know which controls are used on slow pages, how much data is displayed at the same time, which browsers you used for testing, and finally, the version of the DevExpress controls that you use.

Answer 2

I understand that this question is quite old, and the author has long made a decision. However, when I personally ran my company to use DevExpress, and I tried to take away all the performance I could, a Google search would always point to this topic, and many like it on the Internet. There is always a question, a few anecdotal answers, and usually an answer from someone who works on DevExpress. I rarely find honest answers from experienced people.

In the past, I used Telerik, Infragistic, and DevExpress. In terms of performance and maintenance, DevExpress is the worst. All of their controls have odd properties and accessors that are not consistent with what anyone who is familiar with ASP.NET or even HTML would expect. Because the properties and accessors of controls are so confusing, you will find that you wrote about twice as many lines of code as are needed in a regular .NET application.

DevExpress controls appear as highly bloated, nested tables. Some controls demonstrate a lighter rendering mode, but their style and functionality do not match other DevExpress controls, and I found that they do not work well in cross-browser testing.

Custom styles require many, many custom CSS selectors that force you to code DevExpress class names in your CSS due to the nesting and stealth of the control properties. This is a very bad practice, because DevExpress can and should be able to change its internal CSS class names whenever they see fit.

These controls also create an absurd amount of GET requests for their DXR.axd handler, which serves the resources.

There is no doubt that their controls work fine in the Demo environment, and only 1 control is displayed on the screen, but in the real world these controls are terrible and should be avoided. Add your own controls or just bootstrap and use your own ASP.NET controls. I replaced DevExpress with the controls I created in this style, the native HTML type that comes from .NET, and the following diagram illustrates some of the differences in resource usage between them. There was no change in the page layout, business layer, data layer or database code for this swap, just replacing the DevExpress controls that I had previously optimized, and tried to compress every bit of performance because of my own controls.

Chart Comparing DevExpress with User Controls

Answer 3

This is bad, but I will not point directly to the DevExpress controls when assigning blame - I would use a profiler against my code to decide where the problem really is.

Answer 4

Soham

As a rule, when designing on the Internet, try to keep your pages bright so that they can work faster. For example, do you need only 20 controls on one page?

And if they don’t need any special functionality, you can use your own rendering .

Also, check out my article on DevExpress web.config settings to improve performance .

Btw, I work at DevExpress. :)

Answer 5

I don't have DevExpress experience, but you can also check Asp.net Performance Improvement . It may also help.

Answer 6

2016 - Over the past 5 years, I have used Infragistics, Dev Express, Telerik in this order.

Infragistics I will not even begin, because it is a subject for myself.

My biggest pet peeks with Dev Express - their controls add some “bloat” to the overall result. However, some controls have a set of features that are worth bloating. Of course, their grid and pivot grid are complex tools that allow the user to do many things, and I successfully implemented Devexpress packages that worked quickly with very good results. I have two problems with Dev Express:

• Each time I install a new version, it breaks a significant part of the code, both into the implementation of WebForms and in MVC. This is rather unpleasant, but as expected, programmers expected.
• They really don't look very pretty, you need to make significant efforts to get them to look at something close to the boot table, etc. After that, although they allow all the necessary bells and whistles. You could, of course, because the authors listed above offer you their own, this is always an option, but not because people buy controls. They are trying to use their time so that they can be realized faster.

Having said all this, Telerik is the best in its class, in my opinion, today. Easier to implement, meshes are fast, have the desired functionality and look better.

Answer 7

If you use 20 controls containing formatted text fields, it is probably not easy for the server to display this page, which contains many hierarchies of long tags. DevExpress does not work well with multiple controls. Reusing a single ASPxTextbox control may take KB compared to hundreds of bytes in an ASP.net text field control.

Answer 8

Very often, more than 20 controls are used for the login page. I have been using devexpress for many years, speed and performance are acceptable. We use to create an ERP solution.