Rendering speed of cola-layout in cytoscape.js

Question

I applied cola-layout from cytoscape.js on a data set of over 500 nodes and edges. The layout renders the graph and takes more than 10 minutes to settle down to an open-graph.

My question is whether or not this is the amount of time, cola would take to display a graph with such complexity?

In order to get a visually pleasing (balanced) graph like this infinite:true

within cytoscape.js file that I had downloaded from here.

I had set,

infinite: true; // for cola layout

---

Without which it would settled down to an entangled graph like this : infinite:false

Here is the javascript code:

$(function()
{
  $('#cy').cytoscape
  ({
    style: cytoscape.stylesheet()
      .selector('node').css({'content': 'data(name)'})
      .selector('edge').css({'target-arrow-shape': 'triangle'})
      .selector(':selected').css({'line-color': 'black'})
    elements: {
      nodes: [
        { data: { id: '2335', name: '2335' } },
      //.
      //. data from www.briandunning.com/sample-data/ca-500.zip

    },
],
  edges: [
    { data: { source:'2335', target:'Canton' }
      //.
      //. data from www.briandunning.com/sample-data/ca-500.zip
    }]
},
  layout: { name: 'cola'},
  ready: function()
  {
    window.cy = this;
  }
});


}); 

Answer 1

I think you may have answered your own question! If you set infinite: true, then the layout will run infinitely. So, of course in that case it will run a long time, and in fact it will never stop unless you make API calls to do so explicitly.