Large html pages and slow load times/high CPU usage

[Henry Spencer]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Madison Kelly wrote:
>    I am stress-testing my backup program now and I've noticed that with 
> a sample partition with ~26,000 directories when they are all set to be 
> displayed it creates a ~1.5MB html file...  When I send the 
> output to the browser though Mozilla jumps to 100% CPU usage and it take 
> a very long time (minutes) to load the same data.
>    Is the browser taking time because of the render time (each directory 
> creates a cell in a table)?

Rendering of huge tables is almost always slow, especially if the machine
doesn't have piles of memory.  It's typically necessary for the browser to
build up a data structure representing the *entire* table before it can
decide how wide columns should be etc.  This takes a long time and a very
large amount of memory (the representation is often quite inefficient),
and especially if that's driving your machine into paging/swapping, it's
not too surprising that it's slow. 

If you can find some way of breaking that table up into smaller ones, or
using something simpler than a table, odds are you'll see a major
improvement. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org


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