Winform treeview sorted property is slow - winforms

Question

I have a winforms TreeView control with the Sorted property set to true. I also override the default sorter by assigning and instance of IComparer to the TreeViewNodeSorter property.
Unfortunately adding a few thousand nodes using the AddRange function takes perhaps 10 seconds. If I set Sorted to false the AddRange function is < 1/2 second. (please no discussions about the validity of adding so many nodes)
Aha I hear you say.. there is a problem in my IComparer object. Not according to the profiler. Barely any time is spent in the sorting object and yet the AddRange function is right at the top of the list of slow functions.
The problem is easy to replicate in a test project. Simply create a list of TreeNodes and add it to the an existing expanded tree node using the AddRange function. This will use the default sort on the tree text - again it is disproportionately slow.
To demonstrate how disproportionately slow it is if I disable the Sorted property in the test probject and use the List<T>.Sort function (with a delegate that compares the Text of the nodes) on my list of nodes before adding them to the tree there is virtually no delay.
This leads to the workaround of sorting the nodes manually before using AddRange. That's OK but it means a lot of work to find the correct insertion point when adding nodes to an existing set of child nodes - rather less convenient than simply setting Sorted to true.
Is there anyway to speed up the behaviour?
EDIT - it seems the only way is to sort before adding.. it's a bit of a hassle but I came up with the following extension method:
public static void AddSortedRange(this TreeNodeCollection existingNodes, IList<TreeNode> nodes, TreeView treeView, IComparer sorter)
{
TreeNode[] array = new TreeNode[nodes.Count + existingNodes.Count];
existingNodes.CopyTo(array, 0);
nodes.CopyTo(array, existingNodes.Count);
Array.Sort(array, sorter);
treeView.BeginUpdate();
existingNodes.Clear();
existingNodes.AddRange(array);
treeView.EndUpdate();
}
It is quicker to copy the existing nodes to an array, append the new nodes, sort the array and then replace that trying to manipulate nodes inline in the tree view - the slowest operation in the above code is the existingNodes.Clear() call

Answer 1

The performance problems you have are related to the fact that you are adding items to a sorted TreeView. What happens behind the scenes when you add to a sorted list is that for each item that you are adding, it tries to find it's place, which means that it needs to go through the whole list for each item, now imagine how many iteration that makes for each new item :)
What you can do is this:
TreeView tv = new TreeView(); // Just so I have a TreeView variable
TreeNode[] nodes = ... // Well, your list of nodes that you want to add
tv.SuspendLayout();
tv.Sorted = false;
tv.Nodes.Clear();
tv.Nodes.AddRange( nodes );
tv.Sorted = true;
tv.ResumeLayout();
For performance reasons we are using the SuspendLayout/ResumeLayout methods to disable the painting process used by the TreeView when manipulating it's items, which we would cause by removing the items and then adding them as well, since it would need to repaint to add the new item that you are adding (for each of the items).
Right before we are doing any changes to the Nodes Collection we have to call Sorted = false; to disable the sorting (this is just temporary - the user will not see any changes because of SuspendLayout).
Then just add the items to the collection (since the TreeView is not sorted for the time being it should be really quick).
Then we enable the sorting again by calling Sorted = true; setting the Sorted Property to true will cause for the collection to do a sort.
This way, the sort will be performed only once (and therefore the TreeView will just go once through the items).
One more thing, if you have a custom sorter defined for the ListView (tv.ListViewItemSorter), set it to null before adding the items as well, just temporary of course, re-enable it again before the ResumeLayout call.

Answer 2

I experienced a locking situation using the Sort() method.
It worked fine for weeks, then once, it stucks, stucking my application with 25% CPU in the task manager.
var allTags = _TagEngine.GetTags(1, force);
try
{
TagTree.BeginUpdate();
TagTree.Nodes.Clear();
foreach (var rec in allTags)
{
... adding nodes in the tree
}
TagTree.Sort(); // <= stuck here !
}
finally
{
TagTree.EndUpdate();
}
So I watch inside the Sort() method using a decompiler, and I noticed it handles already the BeginUpdate/EndUpdate feature internally.
Then I moved the TagTree.Sort() outside the BeginUpdate/EndUpdate, and it works fine since.
var allTags = _TagEngine.GetTags(1, force);
try
{
TagTree.BeginUpdate();
TagTree.Nodes.Clear();
foreach (var rec in allTags)
{
... adding nodes in the tree
}
}
finally
{
TagTree.EndUpdate();
}
TagTree.Sort();
I hardly understood what happened here. Why it worked in the past, and suddenly stoped. Frankly, I did not had time enough to dig further and anyway, the most important is here : it works again.

Answer 3

I made a simple extension to the TreeView control. It is very fast. It moves internal storage to a Dictionary which makes a huge difference. In my real world example I have 100000 records that I need to load. It took 37 minutes before, but now it takes 2.2 seconds!!
You can find example and code on CodeProject: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/679563/Fast-TreeView