CMaps Plugin Performance Tuning Tips

The Centigon Solutions team is constantly improving CMaps Plugin and GMaps Plugin performance so data rendering, pan, zoom, and refresh all occur seamlessly with large volumes of data. The following tips will ensure you get the best performance with thousands of locations in your map.

VIDEO: Optimizing GMaps Plugin performance (lessons also applicable for CMaps Plugin)

Address Data v.s. Latitude/Longitude

Make sure you are using CMaps Plugin 4.5 and higher. This provides significant enhancements to geocoding and performance for common administrative areas and a new caching solution that ensures great performance for lots of addresses or points when there is no latitude,longitude available.

When plotting data points in a map you have the option to use comma separated Latitude/Longitude or address data like the following:

-122.4334,54.4343

When you use latitude,longitude the map will automatically plot those locations without any geocoding required. “Geocoding” is the process of converting a geographic dimension into latitude,longitude or X,Y numeric format.

MUST READ FOR NOW CMAPS USERS: Guide for optimizing geocoding performance and accuracy

Batch Geocode Your Data

The best performance is achieved when using geocoded data (data that is converted to latitude,longitude). Centigon Solutions is here to help with batch-geocoding services for your organization. Contact us for more details. support@centigonsolutions.com

Common administrative areas

Common geographies including but limited to the following do NOT count against your daily limits thanks to CMaps Analytics geocode cache and will result in fast performance.

Country – Global
State / Province – Global
County – US only
Zipcode – Us Only

New with CMaps Plugin 4.1.6: Override Auto-Build

Introduced in CMaps Plugin 4.1.6, the new property Override map auto creation. This property will prohibit CMaps Plugin from loading on map initialization until your initial data connections have finished loading. This eliminates conflicts between your data and CMaps fetching tiles.

SYMPTOM FOR USING THIS FEATURE: If you load up your map and it appears as a small square, this is a feature you should use.

The goal is to grant more control to developers when the map will refresh and save initialization performance, and also prevent conflicts when the dashboard is refreshing data “before components are loaded�.

LEARN MORE

Disabling Glow

By default, when you have glow enabled, a blue (or whatever the glow color may be) shadow/glow effect happens whenever you select a given marker, to visually indicate that it has been selected. It’s strictly a visual cue and has no impact on other map behaviors other than speeding up the time it takes to render the icons. You can think of the glow effect as an additional weight that each icon has to carry around when glow is enabled. You won’t notice a huge performance gain with a few markers but when you’re looking at thousands, disabling glow can really speed things up. So the impact should be that after disabling glow, the map will experience a noticeable panning/zooming/rendering performance gain

Marker Types

  • Centigon Solutions includes multiple marker types.
  • Stylized Icons- Standard icons included with GMaps Plugin
  • High Performance Icons- Designed for larger data sets for dashboards greater than 3,000 “Basic Circle” and “Basic Star” are designed to maximize performance of the map.
  • Heatmaps- Heatmaps inherit the same performance as stylized icons

Using CMaps Plugin InfoWindow Designer

Available with CMaps Plugin 4, you have access to InfoWindow Designer property which allows you to introduce complex infowindows without large volumes of concatenate. InfoWindow designer offloads the label to a single property, granting significant performance advantages.

Shapefiles

Shapefile size- The recommended shapefile size should not be larger than 1.5MB. If your file is much larger, feel free to contact Centigon to get assistance compressing your shapefiles.

Number of Objects- Typically a shapefile should not contain more than 4000 objects

Mobile- It is important that for adequate mobile performance that shapefiles should not exceed 500K in size.

Learn how to use the InfoWindow Designer

Upgrading to the latest version

You should use CMaps Plugin 4.5 or higher to squeeze maximum performance out of your dashboards with CMaps.