This article presents performance measurements for different products including Aspose.Cells. Performance estimates presented here are intended to help you understand what to expect from different components in some commonly used scenarios under similar configurations on commodity hardware running widely used operating systems. Naturally, your application performance depends on your data, data access patterns, cache size, other configuration parameters, operating system and hardware etc. The benchmark aims to illustrate how the components perform under minimum hardware conditions, the faster the hardware, the faster the tasks will be processed by the components.

Declaration

This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subjected to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose.

Introduction

Benchmarks provide guidelines and help to set basic operational expectations. The topic shows benchmark tests that have been performed with different potential components. The Performance Measures allow even novice users to benchmark the performance the component they are using. By running through a battery of tests, taking only a few seconds / minutes, it will measure the speed of each component and gives an overall rating. The tests will allow you to objectively benchmark a component using a variety of different speed tests then compare the results to other components. All the tasks are common and carefully chosen exploring each component’s features to make sure that all the components may complete the tasks with ease. Moreover, the APIs to perform a test by each component are carefully chosen and selected to get the best possible results that a component can produce while evaluating its performance and all the tasks were implemented twice / thrice to better judge the figures.

The benchmark results are presented as easy to read using tables and bar charts.

In addition to benchmarking, these tests can be used to measure the effect of configuration changes and upgrades. Overall, the benchmark results are useful for evaluating the following key points:

                        • Find out if your component is performing at its best.

                        • Compare the performance of one component to other similar components.

                        • Measure the effect of configuration changes and upgrades.

                        • Avoid paying for overpriced components only to get poor performance.

                        • Make objective independent measurements on which to base your purchasing

                         decision.

                        • Measure the graph performance of the benchmarks related to a component.

Components Participating in the Quest

After searching the potential products in the market we come up with some products / components. According to our policies, we don’t mention the names of our competitors. We do not disrespect our competitors and don’t want to disregard them either. This document has only informative purpose for the users. So, we will only call them as Product1, Product2 etc. We choose 4 components including Aspose.Cells. (Note: To make them equal we chose the evaluation versions of all the products involved):

                        • Aspose.Cells

                        • Product1

                        • Product2

                        • Product3

System Hardware

The benchmark aims to illustrate how the components perform under the minimum hardware conditions. We performed all the tests on a single processor Intel Celeron(R) CPU 2.40GHz with 512 MB RAM and running Windows XP.

Note: These tests were conducted at some time using a specific version of Aspose.Cells component. Aspose.Cells team always try to optimize the component related quality and performance with every new release of the product. So, it is quite possible that you can get even better results using the same hardware and system configurations.

Testing Methodology

All the performance tests were conducted on a common hardware and operating system combinations, without customized configuration, tuning or any other performance enhancing techniques. All tests were run with the component installations on the same system that were otherwise quiescent. To get accurate readings, we performed all the tasks twice / thrice at a time to better evaluate a component and to get accurate readings.

Task Categories

We chose some common tasks under the following two categories in WinForms, both the categories consisted of some common scenarios, each scenario represented a common task which was performed by each component:

1.   Creating Excel File(s) from the scratch.

2.   Reading / Updating existing Excel File(s).

Creating Excel File(s) from the scratch

In this category, there were three scenarios used. i.e. Scenario1, Scenario2, Scenario3.

Scenario1                 

This scenario denotes a common Task that presents how and at which speed the different components would achieve and complete a task on the same system. In this scenario, a certain number of excel files filled with common data are to be created from the scratch. Each file represents a workbook with a fixed number of worksheets in it. In this scenario, we measured benchmarking results of Aspose.Cells, Product1, Product2 and Product3.

Task:

Create 50 XLS File(s). Each Workbook contains five worksheets with 150 * 50 records in each worksheet. Each worksheet is filled with constant (similar) data into the cells.

Code Snippets

We wrote code snippets used by different components with awareness to accomplish the task. The APIs to perform the task for each component are parallel and carefully selected to specify the best possible way to obtain the results to measure the performance. Due to some internal reasons and our policies, we only provide Aspose.Cells code segment here.

using Aspose.Cells;
.
.
.
.
private void button2_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
try
         {
         saveFileDialog.FileName = "AsposeSample.xls";
         saveFileDialog.Filter = "Microsoft Excel Workbooks (*.xls) | *.xls";
         if (saveFileDialog.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
                  {
                         CreateAsposeCellsFiles(saveFileDialog.FileName);
                  }
         }

         catch (Exception ex)
         {
          MessageBox.Show(ex.Message,"Error",MessageBoxButtons.OK,MessageBoxIcon.Error);
         }
}
private void CreateAsposeCellsFiles(string filename)
{
       DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
         for (int wkb = 0; wkb<50;wkb++)
         {
             Workbook workbook = new Workbook();
             workbook.Worksheets.RemoveAt(0); 

             for(int i = 0;i<5;i++)
             {
                  Worksheet ws = workbook.Worksheets[workbook.Worksheets.Add()];
                  ws.Name = i.ToString();
                  for (int row=0;row<150;row++)
                         {
                            for (int col =0;col<50; col++ )
                              {
                                  ws.Cells[row,col].PutValue("row" + row.ToString() + " col" + col.ToString());
                               }

                           }
                  }
                  workbook.Save(filename + wkb.ToString()+ ".xls"); 
         }
         DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
         TimeSpan time = end -start;
        MessageBox.Show("50 File(s) Created! \n" + "Time consumed (Seconds): " + time.TotalSeconds.ToString(),"I n f o",MessageBoxButtons.OK,MessageBoxIcon.Information);

}

Task Results (Scenario1)

The results show that Aspose.Cells used 17.21 seconds to complete the task, Product1 consumed 33.67 seconds to complete the task, Product2 spent 23.62 seconds to complete the task and Product3 utilized 70.95 seconds to complete the task. So, Aspose.Cells took the least time to finish the task and Product3 took the utmost time for the task. We reviewed the file(s) created by each component to check data, they are fine tuned as described in response to their respective code snippets. The following table provides a quick view for the Task results:

Scenario2                 

This scenario denotes a common Task that specifies how and at which speed the different components would achieve and complete a task on the same system. In this scenario, an excel file filled with some dummy data are to be created from the scratch. The file represents a workbook with a single worksheet in it. In this scenario, we measured benchmarking results of Aspose.Cells, Product1 and Product3. Product2 does not qualify to participate in this expedition as its evaluation version does not allow this.

Task:

Create an XLS File. The Workbook contains a single worksheet with 10,000 * 30 records. The worksheet is filled with similar dummy data into the cells.

Code Snippets

We wrote code snippets used by different components with awareness to accomplish the task. The APIs to perform the task for each component are parallel and carefully selected to specify the best possible way to obtain the results to measure the performance. Due to our policies, we only provide Aspose.Cells code segment here.

using Aspose.Cells;
.
.
.
.
private void button2_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
         try
         {
         saveFileDialog.FileName = "CellsSample.xls";
         saveFileDialog.Filter = "Microsoft Excel Workbooks (*.xls) | *.xls";
         if (saveFileDialog.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
            {
                CreateAsposeCellsFile(saveFileDialog.FileName);
            }
         }
         catch (Exception ex)
         {
          MessageBox.Show(ex.Message,"Error",MessageBoxButtons.OK,MessageBoxIcon.Error);

         }
}
private void CreateAsposeCellsFile(string filename)
{
         DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
         Workbook workbook = new Workbook();
         Worksheet ws = workbook.Worksheets[0];
         for (int row=0;row<10000;row++)
         {
                  for (int col =0;col< 30; col++ )
                  {
                           ws.Cells[row,col].PutValue(row.ToString() + "," + col.ToString());
                  }
         }
        workbook.Save(filename); 
        DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
        TimeSpan time = end -start;
        MessageBox.Show("File Created! \n" + "Time consumed (Seconds): " + time.TotalSeconds.ToString(),"I n f o",MessageBoxButtons.OK,MessageBoxIcon.Information);

} 

Task Results (Scenario2)

The results show that Aspose.Cells used 7.51 seconds to complete the task, Product1 consumed 9.30 seconds to complete the task, and Product3 spent 14.14 seconds to complete the task. So, Aspose.Cells took the least time to finish the task and Product3 took the utmost time for the task. We reviewed the file created by each component to check data, it is fine tuned as described in response to their code snippets. The following table provides a quick view for the Task results:

 Scenario3                 

This scenario denotes a common Task that represents how and at which speed the different components would achieve and complete a task on the same system. In this scenario, an excel file filled with similar data are to be created from the scratch. The file represents a workbook with a fixed number of worksheets in it. In this scenario, we measured benchmarking results of Aspose.Cells, Product1, Product2 and Product3.

Task:

Create an XLS File. The Workbook contains five worksheets with 150 * 56 records in each worksheet. Each worksheet is filled with similar data into the cells.

Code Snippets

We wrote code snippets used by different components with awareness to accomplish the task. The APIs to perform the task for each component are parallel and carefully selected to specify the best possible way to obtain the results to measure the performance. Due to some internal reasons and our policies, we only provide Aspose.Cells code segment here.

using Aspose.Cells;
.
.
.
.
private void button2_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
         try
         {
         saveFileDialog.FileName = "ACellsSample.xls";
         saveFileDialog.Filter = "Microsoft Excel Work