So I have been playing around with a home project that includes a lot of js. I having been using Script# to write my own library etc. Personally I wouldn’t write a lot of js if I didn’t have a tool like Script# or GWT to help maintain it.
So far it includes these external libraries:
– ASP.NET AJAX
– ExtJS
– Google Maps
– Google Visulisations
– My own library to wrap the above libraries and add extra functionality…
So that works out to be a heap of js. It runs fine on my pc. I however have little faith in js/browsers and I am concerned that loading too much js will cause the browser to die or perform poorly.
Is this a valid concern?
Does anyone have any experience with loading a lot of js into the browser that has resulted in performance issues? I however know there are a lot of variables here, for example browser type (I assume IE is worse than others) the client PCs RAM etc, but it would be good to get other peoples experiences. I would hate to invest a lot of time into js only to find that I am painting myself into a corner.
The more I use Script# the more client classes I have as I move more processing onto the client. At what point would this start becoming an issue? I’m sure the browser could easily handle 100 MS Ajax classes but at what would be too far for a browser?
NOTE: I am not concerned about the actual js file sizes but more the runtime environment that gets loaded.
with modern browsers routinely occupying 250 MB of RAM or more, script caching, and optimized javascript engines, keeping the script library resident would probably be negligible added load in most reasonable scenarios.
the biggest bottleneck would probably be intitial load time of the scripts – downloading and parsing them. but once that’s done, the scripts are cached and the per-page initialization isn’t very noticeable.