IronXL Milestone: Huge Performance and Memory Increases

Updated: IronXL Performance Improvements
Key benefit: Operational speed improvements, enabling new efficiency.
Secondary benefits: Improvements in memory allocation.
Date shipped: September 2023

As IronXL has grown to boast over 500k NuGet installs at the time of our latest September 2023 release (2023.9.29), we reflect on all the achievements and updates our development team has packed into the last year to move IronXL into a front-runner product in the .NET Excel document library market.

"I need faster IronXL, even on my low spec computer!"

IronXL Performance Improvements

IronXL has seen enormous improvements in terms of operation speed and memory. In this section we will compare IronXL to a year ago, last September (2022.9), as well as last month August (2023.8).

IronXL Version 2023.9 (Latest) vs IronXL Version 2023.8 (Last Month) vs IronXL Version 2022.9 (Previous Year)

In the following figure, we see many metrics being compared: IronXL has improved compared to last year and month based on ALL metrics.

Competitors vs IronXL Version 2023.9

IronXL Memory Allocation Improvements

IronXL has seen enormous improvements in terms of operation memory usage. This is important progress that ensures newer versions of IronXL will use less memory, saving you production time and money without changing code.

In this section we will compare IronXL to a year ago, last September (2022.9), as well as last month August (2023.8).

In the following figure, we have three metrics being compared:

Accessing a Cell Range's Properties

The same operation reduced in memory usage from 4.41 to 3.8 kilobytes. Amounting to a 14% improvement on the year!

Random Cells Operation

The same operation reduced in memory usage from 9.26 to ~8.5 kilobytes. Amounting to an 8% improvement on the year!

Removing a Large Row Operation

The same operation reduced in memory usage from 65.46 to ~20.3 kilobytes. Amounting to a 69% improvement on the year! Note the logarithmic scaling on the Y-axis, as this underrepresents that we have cut this operation down TWO THIRDS.

With a regular Y-axis we can see this 69% improvement:

Below we also compare much larger operations:

In the following figure, we have three metrics being compared:

Data Cell Operation

The same operation reduced in memory usage from 676.81 to 669.91 kilobytes. Amounting to a 2% improvement on the year! This works out to be very significant considering how many of these occur in any edit of an Excel document.