Fluster2 0.1.1 with significant performance improvements

It’s five days since Fluster2 was released and I had the chance to use it in production the first time. When working on this I realized that it was quite slow, the map didn’t work properly when using >1000 markers (changing zoom mode or dragging the map was very slow, even in Google Chrome). So I tried out some things and found a solution. This is Fluster2 0.1.1 now.

Two things changed:

• Markers must not be added to the map, only to Fluster. Then Fluster only assigns markers to the map which have to be displayed. This speeds up the whole map (when changing zoom mode or dragging the map) and makes it about 15 times faster (measured with the 200 markers example included in the download package).
• Fluster only calculates markers and clusters which are in the viewport of the map. When increasing zoom mode, fewer markers/clusters have to be processed. When dragging the map, calculation of the needed markers is triggered.

Download

From now you can download Fluster2 from SourceForge.

Clustering for Google Maps v3 with Fluster2

Everyone knows the pain of displaying a lot of markers in a Google Map. For this problem there is MarkerClusterer which merges multiple markers to one cluster marker if there are a lot of markers at one place – as long as you use Google Maps v2. We used MarkerClusterer in our Community Software Fusonic Connect too but wanted to migrate to Google Maps v3. So we had to write our own clusterer logic or adapt MarkerClusterer to work for v3. The result is Fluster2, a new clusterer built from scratch but based on the same logic as MarkerClusterer.

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