I have a dialog that contains about 5000 items retrieved via getJSON and then wrapped in individual div tags. I was loading the list each time the dialog was opened and it was slow, so I ended up generating the dialog on page load with autoOpen: false, then calling dialog("open") when I wanted to display it.
However, the dialog is barely any faster when it opens still (5-6000 ms), so I'm wondering:
1. Does the jQuery UI dialog function render the contents each time dialog("open") is called? Or is it slow because it has to run through and figure out scrollbar math, etc?
2. What can I do to speed this up? Is there a way to pre-render the contents and then quickly pop up the dialog as needed?