Re: [docbook-apps] Slow TOC tree in webhelp when there are a largenumber of heading entries

[Kasun Gajasinghe <kasun.gajasinghe@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 9:52 PM, Peter Desjardins
<peter.desjardins.us@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

We use minimal-size compacted version of the treeview and JQuery-UI,
so those names won't make any sense! :)

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

WebHelp uses JQuery framework for JavaScript. The Tree generation is
done by TreeView plugin for JQuery [1]. Note that it's not
custom-made.
There's an option to remove JavaScript-based dynamic generation of
tree to pre-rendered tree. Have a look at the demos. [2] has a good
documentation. This'll probably reduce the JavaScript execution since
the tree is prerendered.

Some new updates to the plugin since the release of the plugin. But I
don't think it really changes anything. We've tested WebHelp with the
book "DocBook: The Definitive Guide" which is comparatively very large
[3], and we didn't see significant degradation of performance.  I'm
not in a position to test it again in IE since I'm on Ubuntu.

[1] http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-treeview/
[2] http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/treeview/index.htm
[3] http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/gsoc2010/defguideout/content/pr02s01.html

Regards,
--Kasun

>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> Peter Desjardins
>
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-- 
~~~*******'''''''''''''*******~~~
Kasun Gajasinghe,
University of Moratuwa,
Sri Lanka.
Blog: http://kasunbg.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/kasunbg