Since all of the stages are deterministic out of the box I would expect that you could rerun the layout with the new dimensions and get the same layout taking into account the new dimensions. We could also take an attribute that skips the rank and order phases for efficiency reasons, but this would require that all nodes already have a rank and order assigned. It shouldn't be a lot of work to do this, provided we're getting the deterministic layout I'm expecting.

The big question: Would this save us much in terms of rendering time? I don't know how expensive ranking and order are compared to the later phases. If it isn't at least 50%, there probably isn't too much of a reason there.

You can find out empirically by setting the debugLevel to at least 1. This will turn on timing instrumentation for each of the phases.

On the first graph I'm working on, it appears that about 2/3rds of the time is spent on ranking and ordering (131ms of 193ms). There may be something there.