Slow TOC tree in webhelp when there are a large number of heading entries

[Peter Desjardins <peter.desjardins.us@gmail.com>]

Hi, I am using the webhelp output with a set of very long documents.
I'm seeing slow performance with the Javascript table of contents tree
when there are a large number of TOC entries. This causes a serious
problem because Internet Explorer opens a dialog box asking whether
I'd like to "stop running this script."

Internet Explorer 8 displays the dialog box when I include about 690
headings in my test document. The performance in Firefox, Chrome, and
Safari aren't that bad. The Internet Explorer dialog is really
unacceptable because it interrupts each page load.

I'm looking into the underlying JavaScript. The developer tools in IE8
tell me that a function named "L" is taking the most time. I think
that L is a part of the jquery libray. I'm not familiar with tuning
JavaScript though.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Do you know a way to speed
up the TOC loading?

Thanks for your help.

Peter Desjardins