How to export 0.5 million rows to excel/csv (performance issue)?

Question

Currently we are using NPOI for exporting some large data to excel(environment--asp.net mvc-4.0 ). Its taking us around a minute to export 30000 rows to excel. Now the requirement has changed and we want 500000 which is more then 10 times the current rows. NPOI serializer has some limitations which is having drastic performance issue..http://npoi.codeplex.com/discussions/443655 ...So after trying lot of alternatives we decided that we will export this huge chunk of data to csv file. Before starting with this code change I wanted to get an expert opinion on how to handle this scenario where you have to deal with such a massive number of rows export... Is exporting to CSV a better option??? Can any one point out a code sample or an article that has a solution to data export to csv/excel for more the 0.5 million rows within a 1 min timeframe..

Answer 1

Use EPPlus that can now load 50 000 cells in seconds.

Answer 2

Render your data into HTML tables, save the tables somewhere, spawn up the Excel process, and open the table files. Then Save As xls or xlsx. Much faster than attempting to write rows to an open Excel sheet running in another process.

I'm speaking from experience. :-)