How to speed up picturebox graphics

Question

I have a program that takes some information from databases and represents it graphically via pictureboxes in a form. Each piece of data is a differently colored picturebox and it basically looks like defragmenter.

For example

The program uses a loop to go through specific chunks of the database and represents it graphically. The problem is, for large amounts of data/pictureboxes, it takes quite some time to draw them all (eg >20 seconds for few thousand, and even crashes a program for over 10,000 data pieces).

Is there a way to make a program draw those graphics in less then a second or close to it?

Answer 1

You can draw them yourself. Instead of having a lots of picture boxes, just use the Paint event of the control where you want to show them.

The event handler will get a Graphics object for the control that you can use to draw the boxes. You can use the FillRectangle method to draw the boxes.