jquery
Putting Performance In Perspective
The internet is rife with all sorts of advice about performance, and jQuery and JavaScript performance in particular. Unfotunately, a lot of this filters down into a context-free echo chamber that has mixed-results in end-developer code. For instance, you'll see people who think nothing of nesting several AJAX calls, but then they'll end up doing a manual for loop over jQuery selections in in those nested callbacks because they "heard $.each was slow." We should breathe some sanity into this discussion and provide context for our other performance tips by explaining basic things like
- importance of profiling
- optimizing the things that will give you the biggest payoff/that have room for optimation (don't optimize the thing taking 1% of the time)
- balancing performance with maintainability/readability
- avoiding premature optimization, but also, what to prematurely optimize, e.g., caching jQuery collections is not only better because it's faster, but because it improves readability and code structure
- library problems are likely different than your problems. in other words, if your app is slow, it's probably not because of scope chain traversal
- if the only thing slow about your app is the overhead of
$.each, have a Diet Coke
Worth locating and pulling in resources that cover the sub-topics you mentioned above? Profiling, readability, library concerns seem to have been written about by the community at large over the past few months.
@johnkpaul Seems like you got assigned to this. Is it something you'd like to take?
