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Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?
111–117 of 117 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?
#112Visualizing large graphs is a natural desire for people with lots of connected data. But after a fairly small size, there's almost no utility in visualizing graphs. It's much more useful to compute various measures on the graph, and then query the graph using some combination of node/edge values and these computed values. You might subset out the nodes and edges of particular interest if you really want to see them -…
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Re: Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?
#113[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?
#114I had this question a few years back while working on a social network graph project and trying to render a multi-million node graph. Tried Ogma and it worked quite well but it became too slow when approaching the million. Ended up writing my own renderer in C++ and then Rust. Code here: https://github.com/zdimension/graphrust
Tested it up to 5M nodes, renders above 60fps on my laptop's iGPU and on my Pixel 7 Pro. Turns out, drawing lots of points using shaders is fast.
Though like everybody else here said you probably don't want to draw that many nodes. Create a lower LoD version of the graph and render it instead
Re: Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?
#115As someone who's made graphing libraries for over a decade: Are you sure you want to visualize 1 billion nodes? What's the essential thing you're trying to see? Visualizations are great at helping humans parse data, but usually they work best at human scales. A billion nodes is at best looking at clouds, rather than nodes, which can be represented otherwise.
I have a slightly different use case. I have a dependency graph of tasks with each task having some attached info in form key value pairs. I want to be able to easily visualize the complete graph but then filter out stuff using conditions on attached info. The filtering should hide there nodes/tasks in graph and auto-resize display. What would be a good solution to this?
My library (https://gojs.net) can do that easily. Give it a look, and if you think the price is acceptable for your project, contact us and we can make you a proof-of-concept.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?
#116Oh god I ran into this issue! Fewer nodes, but still.
I created an HTML page that used vis-network to created a force-directed nodegraph. I'd then just open it up and wait for it to settle.
The initial code is here, you should be able to dump it into an LLM to explain: https://github.com/HebeHH/skyrim-alchemy/blob/master/HTMLGra...
I later used d3 to do pretty much the same thing, but with a much larger graph (still only 100,000 nodes). That was pretty fragile though, so I added an `export to svg` button so you could load the graph, wait for it to settle, and then download the full thing. This kept good quality for zooming in and out.
However my nodegraphs were both incredibly messy, with many many connections going everywhere. That meant that I couldn't find a library that could work out how to lay it out properly first time, and needed the force-directed nature to spread them out. For your case of 1 billion nodes, force-directed may not be the way to go.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?
#117Visualizing large graphs is a natural desire for people with lots of connected data. But after a fairly small size, there's almost no utility in visualizing graphs. It's much more useful to compute various measures on the graph, and then query the graph using some combination of node/edge values and these computed values. You might subset out the nodes and edges of particular interest if you really want to see them -…
The one really helpful use for a massive nodegraph with way too much data? Convincing people that something is complicated. Eg: illustrating to non-technical people that your codebase is a massive mess.