angular.js performance issues-Collection of common programming errors

So I stumbled across this months after the question was asked when I was having what I think is a similar problem. Let me describe my issue and my solution (that does not involve a directive) and you can see if it applies to yours.

I was building a table. First I’d request the info telling me what rows were in the table, then I’d request more info that fills in the cells of the table. So I’d get the first request and add all the rows to the table, then request the cell data. I’d fetch the cell data by row, but in a large table this would still be a lot of requests. When I got the cell data back for that row, I’d fill it in.

This made for a really cool effect, all the cells with spinning icons waiting for data. BUT, it made it really slow. In Chrome, that was fine, the browser would slow down some, but it would continue to work. But in FF, it would get that annoying “script busy or not responding” messsage. If you clicked Continue it would work fine, but if you clicked “Cancel” you’d stop the script and nothing would work.

So, here’s the solution I came up with. No directive required. All I did was build the data for each row completely, and only then add the row to the variable used by the ng-repeat. This way it is MUCH faster. The rows fill in as it gets all the data back, the $watch’s are still there, but you are not triggering a ton of them at once and you can still have them to be able to change the data later (in my table you can edit each cell of the table so being able to change the data easily later was important).

Hope this helps someone.