Initially when I was using it, I couldn't understand why my page was loading so slow. When I slow, I mean slow; enough to the point that the browser would give you the whole this page could be doing bad things, would you like to stop scripts on this page? slow. Yeah I have a few XHR's here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary. The only thing I could find was that commenting out Dojo requires for the actual Grid dijit improved performance immensely, but how am I supposed to use a grid if I can't include it! I didn't really remember Dojo's demo being slow at all, so I went to investigate on their site.

Copying their example line-for-line worked like a charm. It loaded up nice and quick, no problems, no lag and none of it was my code. So I began to tweak a few things to try and get my data in the grid. First off, I noticed that they were making their includes from the AOL CDN. I've heard about this but never really looked that much into it (as I probably should have). So I took it out, and replaced it with includes from our DreamHost server. Upon doing that, and reloading, this is where the slow down was from.

Don't get me wrong, DreamHost is a great hosting company, but lets face it - you get what you pay for. $90 for two years of hosting, you can't really expect to get lightning fast connections and/or a dedicated machine as your server. Their notorious slow load times had to be the bottleneck that was killing my code. For those not in the know: Dojo require statements essentially make requests to grab all the dojo files that they need. For a heavy duty dijit like the grid, this can add up to a lot of requests! And making these requests through the DH server was what was slowing me down.

So basically, using AOL's CDN to host all the Dojo includes make things insanely faster (load times below!). I guess fast javascript isn't enough, but when dealing with massive JS requests and includes, having a fast host is just as important. Lesson Learned!

DreamHost Hosted Example - Load Time: 27.86s

(link)

AOL CDN Hosted Example - Load Time: 2.96s

(link)

Wow.