I have the following efficiency problem: I want to update entries in a table, say those with class "xyz". Here are two variants A and B.
A. Rebuild the complete inner html of the table in a string table_html and then call $("table").html(table_html). B. Update the cells in question via $("td.xyz").html(cell_html) or a related construct if the entries differ from cell to cell. I would like to do B, because significant parts of my table remain fixed, have click events associated with them, which I would have to re-associate if I did A, etc. However B is really slow compared to A, and the difference grows with the table size. For example, on a table with 5 rows and 50 columns, approach B takes around 300 milliseconds on my machine, while A stays below 50 milliseconds. Any ideas why this is so and how I can get B to work faster? Holger