Huge performance issues!

[baptistebriel]

Hello,

I've been working with tether and tether-select, and decided to made a quick performance test using Chrome's timeline tab..

Looks like there's a lot of painful operations going on; I made a test with ~ 20 custom <select> within the page, and every frames takes ~ 65ms to render. This is way too huge!

Every frame should be ~ 16ms.

We can see here that for every <select> element on the page, the functions are being called:

• position
• cache
• getScrollBarSize

Theses functions cost a lot because of;

position (line 1003):

if (document.body.scrollHeight > window.innerHeight) {

getScrollBarSize (line 172):

var widthScroll = inner.offsetWidth;

Kinda related to this issue from tether-select: https://github.com/HubSpot/select/issues/43

I really think this has to be fixed. Just to be sure, I do not have any other onscrollevents; everything on the screenshots come from tether.js.

[adamschwartz]

Thanks for such a thorough look. We’ll definitely be looking into this. cc @zackbloom

[yairEO]

Sadly this isn't uncommon when there are developers lacking sufficient knowledge in browsers and performance. yes, Tether is awesome and I love it, and been using it for a long time, but.. the code is an absolute horrible mess :(

A quick solution would be using fastDOM everywhere in the code (this is have huge benefits, but is a very tedious thing to incorporate since there are tons of lines of code which touch the DOM without apparent order),

[baptistebriel]

First of all I think it would be nice to cache the scrollbar size widthScroll variable somewhere else, so there's no look-up for the offsetWidth on every scroll event fired.

I guess this would also work for the position detection: cache the document.body.scrollHeight > window.innerHeight test somewhere and call it again only on resize.

[TrevorBurnham]

@baptistebriel I would welcome a PR to make Tether more efficient. Can the result of getScrollBarSize be cached without introducing positioning bugs? I see that this value currently is nominally cached, but clearCache is called at the top of position, which is the 'scroll' event handler.