how to efficiently append content with JQuery

Question

I am using JQuery to append large amounts of text inside a tag. I find the more text currently within the tag the slower appending is, and for large amounts of text it is too slow.

Is there a more efficient way to append text? Such as for instance creating dummy child tags and setting the content of them rather than appending to the parent?

Answer 1

Check this presentation and this one too: jQuery Anti-Patterns
And in general:

• do not .append() in loop
• do not append directly into DOM
• build a string and than append it or use DocumentFragment
• do not append directly into DOM

Answer 2

Use DOM DocumentFragments to append a bunch a node, and take a look on Nicholas Zakas presentation in slideshare "writing-efficient-javascript"