Hi Oleg,

I am thinking you missed the point of my sample and previous discussion. Your two examples might work well with lots of rows but the number of columns you showed is very small. We are loading the data dynamically using the scrollbar and not having any problems with this.

With a limited number of columns, as shown in your example, it does work well. Even a huge number of rows (some of our results are a million or more rows), jqGrid works like a champ. But even with a limited number of rows, when the number of columns gets large, the whole thing gets very, very, very slow.

Theoretically, I agree, I'd love to not show the user 200 columns but in some cases it is necessary. Our grid is completely filterable and the columns are chooseable. We present the users with the result data, they filter the data, they choose what columns they want, and then they have meaningful data. Often, they aren't looking at ever cell, they are filtering a few cells, seeing the number of results, and then exporting the data to do analysis in a 3rd partly took like JMP. So no, they aren't inspecting 200 columns times a million rows individual cells, they are looking at the sorted, filtered results and then doing analysis of the individual cells elsewhere.

I saw the addition of column groups in 4.2, and the best case would be to be able to show/hide whole groups of columns based on some UI. Right now I have a column chooser, but a group chooser would be even better and is something that is on my to try to implement list, we'll see how that goes sometime in the future.

But, if there is something I can do or that can be done to improve speed when the number of columns gets large, that would make the user experience better…. (something other than not presenting most of the columns).

Kevin

As my data is loaded dynamically from the database, what I created just loads data into an array and displays that. You can specify the # of rows and columns and it populates with dummy data. I have it set to 250 columns and 300 rows. At even a modestly high column count it becomes very, very sluggish. Scrolling with the wheel is less obviously sluggish but scropping by moving the scrollbar's thumb becomes unresponsive. The column-chooser at moderately high column count will display quickly and let you choose the coumns, but applying the choice of columns becomes painfully slow (to the point where it appears to be not doing anything).

The archive of my code can be found