Thanks, guys. Michael G., your solution worked like a charm. setTimeout seems to mess with the context ("this" is not recognized within the function). But that was a minor problem. I just assigned "this" to a global variable and used that variable inside setTimeout's function. A couple of other solutions were discussed here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1267275/jquery-show-is-delayed-in-internet-explorer-chrome I also liked the approach of using show()'s callback function: $ ('#foo').show( 0, function() { doOtherThings(); } );
Mike M., Interesting suggestions to use CSS. But even with the CSS approach, I doubt if performance will be any better. Looping through each of the 3000 divs and calling $(this).show() or $(this).addClass('showing') will probably take the same amount of time. What I ended up doing (and it did speed things up) is not use jQuery for hide/show. I now store basic info about all 3000 entities in a JS object { ent0 : { property1 : 'abc', property2 : 'xyz' }, ent1 : { prop1: '123', ..},..}. The HTML for each div is similar, so I just generate a whole new HTML with only the entities I want to show. Then replace the existing HTML with the new HTML. On Sep 27, 2:07 pm, Mike McNally <emmecin...@gmail.com> wrote: > If there's a need to selectively show particular elements out of a > large number, something to try while experimenting with performance > improvements is to construct a CSS block dynamically and then update > it. You'd put together the CSS as a stream of "#randomDiv0021 { > display: block; }" CSS statements, and then just jam the whole thing > into a <style> block (which you can access by "id" attribute. I know > that you have to update style blocks with a particular function in IE > (Firefox lets you use "innerHTML" pretty much anywhere, but IE will > throw an "unknown error" exception); it may be "innerText" or > "cssText" or something like that. Perhaps jQuery deals with that for > us. > > Building and updating a CSS block en masse may or may not be faster > than explicit calls to show() and hide(). If you do build a CSS block, > make sure you do it by constructing an array of strings and then > joinging it together rather than repeatedly appending to a single > accumulating string. > > > > On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Michael Geary <m...@mg.to> wrote: > >> You would expect the "waitingdiv" to appear instantaneously > >> because the bottleneck is in show()ing all 3000 divs. But for > >> some reason it takes a really long time for it to show up. > >> And then it's gone in a flash and all 3000 divs appear. > > > That's because the browser doesn't refresh the page while JavaScript code is > > running. It waits until all your code finishes running and then refreshes > > with all the changes you've made. > > > If you want to see partial results, use setTimeout() to delay part of your > > code: > > > doOneThing(); > > setTimeout( function() { > > doAnotherThing(); > > }, 1 ); > > > Now you will see the results of doOneThing() immediately, before > > doAnotherThing() is called. > > > Mike M's tip sounds good for hiding and showing all your divs, but I think > > that leaves the problem of hiding and showing a subset of them according to > > your filter. I don't have any ideas for you on that, though - I'd have to > > see a test page to get a better idea of what it's doing. > > > -Mike > > > On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 10:25 PM, Sid <nikhil...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> I have a page with about 3000 (expected to grow to around 5000) > >> floating divs. It's a list of entities. > > >> The page also has filters to allow the user to narrow down (no one > >> wants to see 3000 items, of course). > > >> When all filters are removed, I want to show all 3000 divs. After > >> every 2 of these divs, I also need to insert an additional div to > >> "clear" the float. The problem is that $("div.mydivclass").show(); is > >> taking a really long time. Any performance tips? > > >> The other interesting thing that's happening is this: > >> $("body").append(waitingdiv);//Positioned in the center of the screen > >> with a wait gif and "Please wait" message > >> if(appliedfilters.length==0) //No filters. Show all divs > >> $("div.mydivclass").show(); > >> else { > >> .. show only divs that meet filter criteria.. > >> } > >> insertClearingDivs();//Insert a div to clear the float after every 2 > >> visible divs > >> $("div#waitingdiv).remove(); > > >> You would expect the "waitingdiv" to appear instantaneously because > >> the bottleneck is in show()ing all 3000 divs. But for some reason it > >> takes a really long time for it to show up. And then it's gone in a > >> flash and all 3000 divs appear. Incidentally, this also happens when > >> the first filter is applied. In that case, the filter usually narrows > >> down 3000 items to about 100. > > -- > Turtle, turtle, on the ground, > Pink and shiny, turn around.