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Comment by mod | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious why browsers can't handle 18mb of comment data.

I've observed the problem myself when trying to load up old fb conversations to search for some detail I knew was there.

What's 18mb when my machine has 12gb ram?

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I doubt it's the data itself that your browser is struggling with. It's more likely the parsing of the comment content, generation of 20,000 templates, keeping track of probably a quarter million DOM nodes, listening to a hundred thousand events, and making sure all of that is layed out and aligned sensibly in real-time that your computer struggles with.

Here's hoping it's only one event as opposed to a hundred thousand, at the very least.

In jQuery, for instance, you'd do something like

$(parentOfComments).on('eventName', '.commentClass', function() { //dostuff });

The event propagates up to the body or whatever parent element you use.

Good point, although 18 MB of text is a lot of text.

If I might digress a bit… most text editors will choke on an 18 MB text file as well (and if it’s an 18 MB text file with just one line (like a base64 string with no line breaks)… good luck getting anything other than a hex editor to open that with any speed). The only text editor I’ve found that doesn’t bog down too much when opening huge text files (even some of the ones with no line breaks!) is the one that comes with OS X: TextEdit¹.

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¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextEdit

I open pretty decent size sql files (200m-1g) all the time in vi without much issue.

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