Pease Diagnose jQuery IE8 problem on my site

[fion.mccormack]

My wordpress site has a custom built plugin that enables people to compare SIM only deals. The problem is that, on the front end, the deals table takes about 60 seconds load in IE8. It is ten times faster in firefox (about 6 seconds).

The guy that built the plugin says he doesnt know what's wrong with it. I am hoping that someone here will be able to diagnose the problem. I am also open to any other feed back about the efficency of the plugin and how it can be improved. here is the link: http://www.comparisim.co.uk

[AleMonteiro]

I wouldn't bother with that, it's not a bug, it's an IE performance problem.

IE is pretty slow compared with other browsers, speacially Firefox and Google Chrome.

What could be done is improve the plugin performance itself, then it would load faster in IE and even faster in the other browsers.

Another thing that you could do is alert the user that he should use another browser, or at least update IE to 9 or 10 (9 is faster than 8, and 10 it's faster than 9).

I'd say that IE 10 performance is almost ok in comparisson with other browsers.

AleMonteiro, maybe you should profile the site before you say that it is IE. Yes IE8 is slower than all other modern browsers, however after running the profiler in the web developer toolbar, I think it is the way you are loading things.

strip_tags gets called 5,910 times and takes 838.05 milliseconds. Why is it called so many times?
In one of the functions in jquery.dataTables.min.js (can't tell what one as you are using a minified version, just says function name is y) is taking 11,359.65 milliseconds (11 seconds) and in that function it is using appendChild, this is what is taking all the time.

If you have numbers like this where things are being called several thousand times, you need to take a look at how you built it and refactor it.

I've been using the jquery.dataTable plugin for some resent projects and it works fine in IE8, IE9, chrome, firefox and I am loading thousand of records into it.

Part of the issue might be the loading of the images that is causing the delay, try preloading them as well.