As described by asb within comment #23 of the issue Cannot get Timeline view to work he ca not display a big amount of nodes on the timeline.
I think this needs a more general approach, that is why I'm opening a new issue, to get enough priorities and attention to this. It is within the roadmap for the 2.2 release.

Comments

asb’s picture

asb commented
Version: master » 6.x-2.x-dev

Please make noise if there's anything I can help with (the "limited" timeline is still online), but I think this issue should be very easy to reproduce with any set of data.

Greetings, -asb

xamanu’s picture

xamanu commented
Version: 6.x-2.x-dev » master

Sorry, but this has been sleeping for a while. It should go into the Drupal 7.x-3.x version. I don't think it'd make since to do this for the Drupal 6 version, since by nature of drupal core there are some other issues related to performance.

asb’s picture

asb commented
Version: 6.x-2.x-dev » master

That's sad news since I'm stuck on D6, probably for years. So probably the recommendation would be to uninstall the D6 version (instead of presenting incomplete sets of data), I assume?

xamanu’s picture

xamanu commented

asb, I can't rebuild your problem with the 25 nodes. I can have easily more nodes on the timeline and other people can, too.

This issue is related to build a real scalable solution, possibly to integrate AJAX lazy load. But there should not be any problem to display a larger amount of nodes on the timeline right now.

asb’s picture

asb commented

I can't rebuild your problem with the 25 nodes.

Me too ;) In the last couple of months I switched to a significantly bigger server (quadcore, 8 GB of RAM, PHP memory limits 200 MB). This is what I currently get:

  • timeline over a content type with 56 nodes: works
  • timeline over a content type with 184 nodes: works
  • timelilne over both content types: doesn't work

So basically this seems to be highly dependent on external factors like those mentioned above, and probably others as well.

My sample timeline: Drupal-Timeline (Drupal releases, Drupalcons and the like). Nice that this works now without having to limit the timeline to a subset of the available nodes!

However, what I'd really like to accomplish with a timeline display is to visualize movie and camera release dates; this would currently run over 1,200+ respectively 1,500+ nodes, so that would actually require something scaling better than I can accomplish with hardware upgrades.

xamanu’s picture

xamanu commented

What you are exploring seem to me "just" configuration and not really performance issues. Possibly 1200 to 1500 nodes could work, but I haven't tested. Actually therefore we should do the performance overhaul.

asb’s picture

asb commented

Thanks. AJAX lazy load sounds good. But: #1071818: Lazy-loading CSS fails in IE. Sight :-(

lightsurge’s picture

lightsurge commented

Just trying to get my head round this... does this module have issues that simile timeline by itself doesn't? If so what makes it so much more resource-intensive?

Presumably it's not actually the data extraction that's the root of the problem, since that's quite fast, right?

Or even bandwidth, because if we're just using node title, for example, we'd still be able to display many hundreds without too much data for a client to download...

So is it really about the power of the server at all?

Or is the problem is assembling the data into a timeline, and that javascript interpreters are crashing when overloaded with thousands of items, to protect the client's own resources... but surely all simile timelines are subject to the same problem? And yet, a timeline like this with 570 items renders in almost no time at all:

http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/examples/religions/christianity.html