Original Flot maintainer here.

I once had to deal with many million data points for an application. I ended up mip-mapping them client-side.

But regarding sampling, if it's a line chart, you can sample adaptively by checking whether the next point makes a meaningfully visible difference measured in pixels compared to its neighbours. When you tune it correctly, you can drop most points without the difference being noticeable.

I didn't find any else doing that at the time, and some people seemed to have trouble accepting it as a viable solution, but if you think about it, it doesn't actually make sense to plot say 1 million points in a line chart 1000 pixels wide. On average that would make 1000 points per pixel.

We routinely face this in the audio world when drawing waveforms. You typically have on the order of 10-100k samples per second, durations of 10s-1000s of seconds, and pixel widths of on the order of 1-10k pixels.

Bresenham's is one algorithm historically used to downsample the data, but a lot of contemporary audio software doesn't use that. In Ardour (a cross-platform, libre, open source DAW), we actually compute and store min/max-per-N-samples and use that for plotting (and as the basis for further downsampling.

> Original Flot maintainer here.

I discovered flot during my academic research career circa 2008 and it saved my ass more times than I can count. I just wanted to say thank you for that. I wouldn't be where I am today without your help :)

hey!

> But regarding sampling, if it's a line chart, you can sample adaptively by checking whether the next point makes a meaningfully visible difference measured in pixels compared to its neighbours.

uPlot basically does this (see sibling comment), so hopefully that's some validation for you :)