I’m using multiple (100+) autocomplete fields on the same page, all with the same data source, and have noticed that the initialization of the autocomplete fields is a bit slow. From some profiling I’ve done it looks like the bottleneck is the creation of the menu (this.menu = $( "<ul></ul>" ) and so forth in the source code).
It seems kind of unnecessary to create separate menues for each autocomplete field, and so I was wondering if someone knows of a way to make this initialization faster.
I was thinking of making jQuery UI just use the same menu (or preferably the same autocomplete object) on all the input fields, but I don’t know how this could be done without modifying the plugin source code.
You can try only initializing the autocomplete field when the user clicks the field