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Flame Graphs vs Tree Maps vs Sunburst (2017)

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Re: Flame Graphs vs Tree Maps vs Sunburst (2017)

#23

Post by Espressosaurus »

alanbernstein wrote: post #14
Espressosaurus wrote: post #6

All of these suck. Use nested bar graphs like TreeSize and it’s instantly obvious what your biggest hitter is for any particular nesting level. In lieu of that, a flame graph is tolerable. The polar coordinate one is very pretty garbage. EDIT: Use it when you want to mislead people with a flashy graph.

Why do treemaps suck?

It's not as straightforward to compare area as sorted length.

Look at the example in the link and try to make sense of it.

Re: Flame Graphs vs Tree Maps vs Sunburst (2017)

#24

Post by noosphr »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #6

All of these suck. Use nested bar graphs like TreeSize and it’s instantly obvious what your biggest hitter is for any particular nesting level. In lieu of that, a flame graph is tolerable. The polar coordinate one is very pretty garbage. EDIT: Use it when you want to mislead people with a flashy graph.

All embeddings of hyperbolic space into eucleadean space suck. You can't preserve distances and areas between them. Trees live in a hyperbolic space so every visualization of trees on a screen will suck in some way.

This simple math fact is the reason why all grand hyperlink projects from 1960 to 2010 couldn't work, e.g. Xanadu.

Worse, in small examples with fewer than a hundred nodes it looks like it is a real improvement over linear text with jumps - we are after all now using _all_ the possible screen real estate.

Re: Flame Graphs vs Tree Maps vs Sunburst (2017)

#25

Post by tanelpoder »

trevor-e wrote: post #15

The treemap screenshot doesn't look correct. Nearly all charting libs (like Apache Echarts) will group nodes with a heading name, so not sure why they claim it would be hard to notice the "drivers" node. I guess in that screenshot, sure, but that looks like just a bad implementation of a treemap. Maybe this was the case back in 2017? Flame graphs I have a love/hate relationship with. The hierarchy is very useful, but…

At an old startup attempt we once created a nested hierarchy metrics visualization chart that I later ended up calling Bookshelf Charts, as some of the boxes filled with with smaller boxes looked like a bookshelf (if you tilted your head 90 degrees). Something between FlameGraphs and Treemaps. We also picked “random” colors for aesthetics, but it was interactive enough so you could choose a heat map color for the plotted boxes (where red == bad).

The source code got lost ages ago, but here are some screenshots of bookshelf graphs applied to SQL plan node level execution metrics:

https://tanelpoder.com/posts/sql-plan-flamegraph-loop-row-co...

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