jquery - fastest way to remove all rows from a very large table

Question

I thought this might be a fast way to remove the contents of a very large table (3000 rows):

$jq(\"tbody\", myTable).remove();

But it\'s taking

Answer 1

Two issues I can see here:

1. The empty() and remove() methods of jQuery actually do quite a bit of work. See John Resig's JavaScript Function Call Profiling for why.

2. The other thing is that for large amounts of tabular data you might consider a datagrid library such as the excellent DataTables to load your data on the fly from the server, increasing the number of network calls, but decreasing the size of those calls. I had a very complicated table with 1500 rows that got quite slow, changing to the new AJAX based table made this same data seem rather fast.