Do the point collections on .NET charts have an upper limit?

Question

I'm new to the charting functions in .NET's System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting library. During my exploratory prototyping, I created a chart to which I can add random points, change the chart type, etc. But I noticed that every time I add more than 34998 points to the chart (regardless of which type of chart type I use), the entire chart disappears and is replaced with a big 'X'. No exception is thrown, and it doesn't appear to be a limitation of the point collection itself. (If I step through the code when adding the 34999th point, it gets added to the collecion just fine; but as soon as the chart gets repainted, it immediately gets replaced with the X).

I realize that this is a large number of points to have on a chart in the first place, and I plan to look at some decimation techniques to down-sample my input data. But I was just wondering if there is a hard limit at this number, and which module in the system is the actual constraint (dataset, drawing canvas, etc). I couldn't find any mention of it in the documentation. Does anyone know of such a limit?

Answer 1

This line chart has 2 series with 1,000,000 points each:

and it takes 6 seconds to render. I guess the limit is just available memory. One common cause for the "Big Red X Of Doom" is if the points you're adding are outside the Axis's Minimum and Maximum values, in case you're manipulating those.