One of the new things in Flot is support for hovering/clicking with the mouse on the points. I was spending some time yesterday adding highlights so that Flot can show which point you're pointing the mouse at.
I got to the point that I was ready to performance test it, on my trusty old Pentium 3 950 MHz laptop. It felt a bit slow. Surprisingly, the profile from Firebug indicated that the slow function was the jQuery function
offset().I use it to compute where a mouse event is inside the plotting canvas - for some reason computing this offset separately is the only reliable way to know where the mouse is inside the element where the event happened because you only get the global coordinates reliably in the event. You would have thought local coordinates was a natural thing to standardize and every browser support, but no.
Anyway,
offset() walks up the DOM tree, computing offsets along the way. And it was taking 25 ms per invocation on average! That's just ridiculous.The funny thing is that I was meanwhile updating my system, apparently also updating Firefox from 2.x to 3.0.1. So when I boot up today with a couple of ideas for working around the slow offset function, it's now 4 ms on average. That's still far too much for querying a simple DOM tree, but it's not a show stopper anymore.
I think the lesson here is that as soon as you do exotic things in the browser, things that are not really about browsing HTML pages, you get bitten by weird bugs. But the state of affairs is improving.
Pssst. We're having a sale on YayArt. I have it from a reliable source that it's going to end soon.
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