Introducing MultiMarker: The fastest way to add many hundreds or thousands of markers on Google Maps

At Google IO 2009, our fearless leader Sasha Aickin (my boss) demonstrated our high-performance Google Maps utility library to the world; we provided directions explaining how to code it, but we didn’t actually ship the code.

Today, I’m proud to announce that we’ve made our MultiMarker utility library code (formerly known as SuperMarker) available to everyone under the Apache License 2.0. As far as we know, it’s the fastest way to add many hundreds or thousands of markers on Google Maps.

HOW FAST IS IT?

Below, we compare the time required to add 1000 markers in four ways:

1. V2 map using the default GMarker
2. V2 map using Pamela Fox’s MarkerLight
3. V3 map using the default google.maps.Marker
4. Using our MultiMarker library

Note that the GMarker timings you see here were recorded by stopwatch, NOT by automated timer. Also note that these browsers were running on different machines, so you shouldn’t use this table to compare browsers with each other; just compare the columns within each row.

UPDATE: This table was updated on April 22nd to reflect the faster markers available in Google Maps v3.4 nightly.

	V2 Gmarker	V2 MarkerLight	V3 Gmarker	V3 MultiMarker
IE6	44 seconds	9.0 seconds	56 seconds	1.5s
IE7	42 seconds	6 seconds	3.5 seconds	1s
IE8	32 seconds	3.1 seconds	1.5 seconds	<1s
IE9	3 seconds	0.9 seconds	<1s	<1s
FF4	5.1 seconds	1.2 seconds	<1s	<1s
GC10	2.4 seconds	<1s	<1s	<1s
iPhone 4	40 seconds	6 seconds	3 seconds	2 seconds

 

As you can see, a speedup of 10-100x is possible using the MultiMarker technique, depending on which version of GMaps you’re using.

Try the examples for yourself:

Google Maps V2 Comparison Test
Google Maps V3 Comparison Test

Enjoy!