Suspend digest loop until ngReapeat has finished initial rendering - angularjs

I want to know if and how it is possible to suspend digest loops until my array of objects have finished the initial rendering.
I have custom templates defined by the objects they receive, the array is dynamic therefore I'm using ngRepeat. The issue I'm having is that every digest loop takes around 15ms in IE11, but I can have 100-200 templates being rendered, which can add up to ~2000ms.
Is there a way to suspend actual digest loop in ngRepeat from outside, or do I have to decorate the directive itself to achieve that?
Note: Generally other browser are really good with performance and we don't have any issues, but IE11 is a special case and we need every single performance gain we can.

Related

Delay generating directive until after page is ready and responsive

I'm working on a single-page app where some parts are really slow. They're slow because I'm displaying 400 complex things in a repeater for the user to scroll through. Each thing is generated by a fairly complex directive that does a ton of data binding and expression evaluation, adds one or two click handlers, and displays a couple of images. In some cases, I also need a grayscale CSS filter on those images, but that really seems way too slow.
I have of course already turned most of my data binding into one-time data binding, but simply generating the 400 things for the first time is still slow. It's initially hidden through ng-if, which speeds it up when I'm not showing it, but once I do need to show it, everything waits 10 seconds for that to happen. I would like to load it in advance, but using ng-show instead of ng-if means the loading of the entire app has to wait for this.
What I would like, is to load the rest of the app, and then, while we wait for user input, start creating these 400 things so they're ready once I need to show them. I don't want the user to notice how slow this is.
Problem is, I have no idea how to do this. Any ideas?
Edit: Having thought about this (and discussed this with my wife), I'm seeing two options (that I conceptually understand, at least):
The easy, quick, boring and cowardly solution is to simply not show the 400 things at the same time, but cut them in pieces and show 40 at a time. That should make it a lot quicker, but also less nice, as the user needs to click around to access all the data.
The interesting solution is to write a new ng-repeat that generates the 400 transcluded copies of the template each in their own asynchronous event, so they don't block user interaction. I really like this idea, but there's one big downside: it's an ambitious idea with deep Angular magic, and I don't have much time available.
OK, not seeing your code structure, through Q&A, I'm trying to get clarification. If I understand you correctly, I believe the solution is to process your images asynchronously and remove reliance of creating/processing them on the fly when the view is visible (i.e. via clicking on a button/tab to 'show' the array 'view' and thus triggering the ng-repeat). BTW, this solution assumes the delays are because the images are being processed rather than because they are being shown.
METHOD 1 (less preferred)
To do this, it's best to create an 'ImageDataService' service, where it get's kicked off at application start, and proceeds with building this array and taking whatever time it needs asynchronously without caring what view is showing or not. This service will be injected into the proper view or directive controller--perhaps where the current ng-repeat scope is.
Meanwhile, you also need to change the directives inside your ng-repeat to get the pre-built data from the array provided by ImageDataService rather than actually doing the calculation at view time. If the data for that directive is not ready, the directive will show something like 'loading...' otherwise, the directive will simply show the prebuilt images. This way, it doesn't matter when ng-repeat is triggered (i.e. its view is showing), because it will just show what are processed and ready at that point and the display the rest as 'loading...'.
METHOD 2 (I prefer this)
Alternatively, and maybe better, you can forego creating a pre-processed array in a service as in METHOD 1 and instead modify your directives to process their data asynchronously by invoking a service method that returns an asynchronous promise like this:
(code inside a controller)
var promise = ImageDataService.processImage(directiveData);
promise.then(function() {...set the directive image attributes..})
Needless to say, the ImageDataService.processImage() method needs to return a promise when it is done processing the data. The directive, as usual, will show 'loading...' until then. Also, although ImageDataService no longer needs to pre-populate its array mentioned in METHOD 1, it might be a good idea to save the processed images to a similar array anyway to serve as cache and not reprocess them needlessly. NOTE, in this case you don't need to have processImage() inside a service--but it is really good 'separation of concerns' practice to reserve the work of asynchronous data processing (ajax, etc) within a service which can be injected app-wide rather than within a controller.
Either of these 2 general tacks should work.

Would it make sense to use directive instead of filter to speed up performance?

It seems like angularjs 1.x filter is not recommended, with the reason given below:
http://blog.scalyr.com/2013/10/angularjs-1200ms-to-35ms/
Angular runs every single filter twice per $digest cycle once something has changed. This is some pretty heavy lifting. The first run is from the $$watchers detecting any changes, the second run is to see if there are further changes that need updated values.
I wonder if it make sense to either:
Use bind-once with filter
Write custom directive that ensures no additional watch is required?

Too many listeners and slow $compile, need performance tips or something between two-way binding and one-time binding

Sorry, I don't have a live example, I'm looking for performance advice.
I've finally hit my first performance problem with angular, I have a pretty complex UI and in it, I have a directive with about 3 nested repeats that use directives, in every level the directive uses scope: true and using bindToController syntax.
The data source is not that big, but every repeat ends up being between 30-100 watchers (I'm using this snippet to count the watchers)
I'm calling $compile on the top directive and it takes way over a second (!) to show the HTML (it ends up having a few hundred listeners), ng-if and ng-class and other custom directives, it quickly adds up.
I've added one-time bindings wherever I could, but I'm still at way over a 1000 in total and I guess that can slow things down?
I've ran CPU profilers in different browsers, drilled as deep as possible and I never saw my code taking up and significant time, all I see it jquery/angular taking a long long time, but none of the functions inside show any significant self time.
If I open that 800ms elemData.handle, all I see is angular's $scope.eval, compileDirectives and a bunch of other angular stuff in a deep tree.
Could using scope: true be the culprit? Would complex directives perform better if they use an isolate scopes?
Maybe there are advanced methods I don't know to use one-time bindings? Or something between two-way and one-way?
EDIT: for posterity, this is what happened: I managed to replace my isolate scope directives on the inner-most ng-repeat level with simple ng-includes, the functionality is the same, but execution time is 1/1000. I don't think I'll ever really know why the difference was so huge, I never had many items in the ng-repeat, but the code now runs in 1ms :)
Use $destroy events to clean up event watchers
Use one-way-binding everywhere what you can't change manually (ng-repeat, ng-options)
In templates try to avoid functions that will return value. Simple assignment not needed to be compiled but function will run each $digest (ng-if="ctrl.isDataLiading()" slower then ng-if="ctrl.isDataLoaded")
In list items with a lot of ng-repeat avoid filters that will recount and run collection watchers on arrays that is taking great portion of performance - instead use ng-if to remove filtered items
When I was implementing tree structure that can be like expanded to see child nodes (list with + option) I struggled with such problem. Above approach made functionality better but speed did not rise a lot.
In common words all my answer means: angular populates too many watchers, get rid of them

AngularJs Timer Performance Issue

I am using angularJs v1.3.10, And I am making a large application having complex array, I am using ng-repeat on these datastructures.
Some part of pages also use timer, which changes the time per second so my data structure changes per second, so complete dom related to this array reloads. What should be the right process to implement timer in ng-repeat.
initially $apply cycles are around few hundred ms, but after few operations, it goes to few seconds.
what should i do, for page performance.(I am also adding classes dynamically inside ng-repeat).

$scope.$evalAsync vs $scope.$applyAsync

What is the difference between $evalAsync and $applyAsync? My understanding is that when I use $evalAsync from a directive, the expression will evaluate before the browser renders.
So as an example, if I wanted to scroll to a particular position on a page but not show the jump to that spot, I could use this to scroll to the position and since it fires before the browser has rendered, this visual bug would be gone.
However, what is the purpose of applyAsync? When is it a good idea to use one over the other?
The
$evalAsync()
will execute in the current digest
$applyAsync()
in a scheduled one.
If you need details:
Ben Nadel or stack here
Here is what I have been using $applyAsync for. Basically, I use this as a safe $apply. You know that annoying error when you try to trigger a digest when one is already in progress? If you use $applyAsync, you will get another digest, but it will occur when the current digest cycle has completed.
$applyAsync is also cool since you can batch up a bunch of callbacks to fire within then next digest.

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