Calendar component slow to render in IE6/IE7

[Alex Sherwin]

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Hello,

 

I’m working on webapp that uses calendars for a lot of fields.  Unfortunately, the end users will primarily be using IE6/IE7 and that Woodstock calendar component seems to add about 4-5s (each!) to the page render time (i.e. 3 calendars adds ~ 12-15s on page render time).  I realize that this is occurring at the time that the page has been downloaded to the end users browser, and the dojo framework begins to invoke the JS that draws/renders the DOM for each component on the page. 

 

The times I list (4-5s per calendar component) is on my dev machine (XP Pro, IE6 and IE7, 4GB RAM, 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme)…  I’m scared to think how long each of those calendars would take to render on the average workstation running IE6/IE7 that is probably < 1GB RAM, with < 2GHz single core machines.

 

Is there anything I can do to make the calendar do less JS work when the page is drawn?  I’ve resorted to using three dropdowns for day/month/year on pages that get rendered often because the user experience is too slow using calendars.

 

 

Alex Sherwin

alex.sherwin@...

 

[jsr]

Alex Sherwin wrote:

I'm working on webapp that uses calendars for a lot of fields.
Unfortunately, the end users will primarily be using IE6/IE7 and that
Woodstock calendar component seems to add about 4-5s (each!) to the page
render time (i.e. 3 calendars adds ~ 12-15s on page render time).  I realize
that this is occurring at the time that the page has been downloaded to the
end users browser, and the dojo framework begins to invoke the JS that
draws/renders the DOM for each component on the page.  

The times I list (4-5s per calendar component) is on my dev machine (XP Pro,
IE6 and IE7, 4GB RAM, 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme).  I'm scared to think how
long each of those calendars would take to render on the average workstation
running IE6/IE7 that is probably < 1GB RAM, with < 2GHz single core
machines.

Is there anything I can do to make the calendar do less JS work when the
page is drawn?  I've resorted to using three dropdowns for day/month/year on
pages that get rendered often because the user experience is too slow using
calendars.

I've also noticed that the calendar component has some performance problems with IE. However, my performance issues have not been nearly as bad as yours. I'd guess that I see about 1/2 second to a second delay for each calendar on the page with a similar machine. Regardless, the slowness was still enough to make me stop using the calendar component.

I've started using a text field and a free javascript calendar (http://www.java2s.com/Code/JavaScript/GUI-Components/FancyCalendar.htm). There are one or two small modifications needed to the javascript calendar, but overall it works pretty well. For instance, the window.onload sometimes breaks the rendering of the woodstock components. Instead, the calendar's init function needs to be called after the components have all been rendered.