Question

Building an AJAX based site and to keep the speed as high as possible I plan to jquery hide() pages after a user navigates away from them.

This allows me to show() them again instantly if they select them again.

The site is a date site so the vast majority of pages that will be hidden with be members profiles & other std pages like mail, home, search etc.

Question – A std page would be around the same as this stackoverflow page (with respects to HTML/content etc). If I was to have 100 pages like this hidden in the DOM would it cause problems for browsers? What if it was 1000 pages or 5000 pages. I’m interested to know if browsers would struggle or crash if running a site with slowly growing large DOM.

Note: if its a problem I can timestamp pages and remove excess pages when I have over 100 in the DOM etc.

thoughts?

Answer 1

This is an impossible question to answer because

• Depends on the hardward the browser is running on that as a web site you have no control over
• Depends on the browser technology – something else the web site has no control over
• Depends on the available virtual memory – also the web site has no control over.

So in summary the web site has no control over the clients set up, so you have to make a reasonable assumption as to size of datastructures that it can hold in memory (be that real or virtual).