Question

I’m using mostly Javascript on my scripting. I have some scripts which do several tasks every 1 second, and some every 0.02 seconds, etc. My intervals do tasks like checking of ifs, doing some innerHTML, little animation, etc. Now I have 4, but I think it would increase in the future; maybe I’ll control myself to less than 10. Though it doesn’t lag at all in my computer.

1. Generally, will it be good for a site?
2. Since it’s client-side obviously there won’t be any issues with internet connection, right?
3. Is it a bad practice, or is it not much of an issue at all?

Also, I have a question for jQuery. There are things that normal Javascript and jQuery can do similarly (like innerHTML and .html()), right? Given this situation, which should I prefer to use, jQuery or Javascript?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Is having too many setTimeout()s good?: You already gave your self the answer too many is not good, no matter what you talk about.

Generally will it be good for the site: Probably not, remember you don’t know the cpu/browser combo of your users, so you should build your site so it will still be nice to use for people who have slower computers than you. A laggy/unresponsive site is the first one users will flee from.

Since it’s client-side obviously there won’t be any issues with internet connection, right? right, unless you do network requests as part of the timeouts. Ajax calls every second is rarely a good idea.

Is it a bad practice, or is it not much of an issue at all? poor architecture is bad practice. If you wish to follow the best practices, read up on design patterns.

Also, I have a question for jQuery. There are things that normal Javascript and jQuery can do similarly (like innerHTML and .html()), right? Given this situation, which should I prefer to use, jQuery or Javascript? Using jQuery gives you convinient crossbrowser compatibility. In most cases for non-experts using a library like jQuery is better than not using it.