title: Is it possible to speed up adding of a set of elements to DOM?
body: <p>I have a container widget which is updated very often. When some event comes, I need to append a child to container, or remove one of its children. Think of this as of a list of chat participants which listens for the event of joining/leaving the chat.</p>
  
  <p>If the number of children is really big (several hundreds) along with big number of events  arriving, the drawing of DOM starts to slow down. User notices delays. I.e. adding/removing of sub-element to container starts takes more and more time.</p>
  
  <p>How can I speed up this process?</p>
  
  <p><strong>I think of using a kind of a 'batch update' technique, well-known from database applications.</strong> Indeed, if I would collect events of updating my list and run the list of updates one time in a second - will this speed up my computations? In fact the number of widgets to add would not change, but probably by running this task one by one I can get the 'batch' effect somehow?</p>
  
  <p>This is just a guess.</p>
  
  <p>I am using GWT, but its not the point. Execution is especially slow in IE8, but my question is cross-browser.</p>