Does GoJS provide any built-in APIs for measuring performance (diagram load time, layout time, node/link rendering time)?

GoJS
1

Hi Team,

We are working on a fairly complex diagramming application using GoJS, and we are looking to perform detailed performance analysis on various parts of the diagram lifecycle.

Before implementing our own instrumentation, I wanted to check if GoJS already provides any built-in performance metrics or diagnostic APIs.

Specifically, is there any way to measure:

  • Time taken to initialize and load a diagram into the canvas

  • Time taken for layouts to compute (e.g., TreeLayout / LayeredDigraphLayout / custom layouts)

  • Time taken to render nodes and links

  • Time taken to render shapes within node and link templates

  • Any existing hooks, events, debug flags, or internal timers that can be leveraged for this purpose

If there is no official API, is there a recommended approach to instrument these actions reliably without affecting the rendering pipeline?

Any guidance or best practices around benchmarking GoJS performance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

2

No, there is no such API, but that’s a good suggestion.

It is easy of course to implement some of those timings yourself. For example, I often do something like:

let before = Date.now();
myDiagram.addDiagramListener("InitialLayoutCompleted", e => {
  const after = Date.now();
  console.log("load time: ", (after-before)/1000);
});

function load(modelstr) {
  before = Date.now();
  myDiagram.model = go.Model.fromJson(modelstr);
}

But there’s no reasonable way to get render timings for individual GraphObjects.

You can also use your browser’s debugging facilities, such as showing a frames-per-second counter.