Question

When the users of this app make changes to the fields a large amount of changes need to happen across other fields. Typically even with optimized scripts the browser will block user input for upwards of 1 second in IE. To stop with from occurring I do this:

var i = 100;
GetTextInputs().filter('[' + name + ']').each(function()
{    
    setTimeout("DoWork('" + this.id + "', '" + v + "', '" + name + "');", i);
    i += 25;
});

It feels kind of hackish to me but works great.

• Can anything go wrong with this method?
• Alternatively, is there a better way?

Answer 1

One thing that can go horribly wrong is that having too many high-frequency timers can [ironically] make the ui sluggish/unresponsive. From http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-for-mobile-html5-series-using.html:

With low-frequency timers — timers
with a delay of one second or more —
we could create many timers without
significantly degrading performance on
either device. Even with 100 timers
scheduled, our app was not noticeably
less responsive. With high-frequency
timers, however, the story was exactly
the opposite. A few timers firing
every 100-200 ms was sufficient to
make our UI feel sluggish.