The serialize method no longer show up on the top of the profiling lists, and for the clients application in question, this results in a large reduction in the number of method calls. This doesn't necessarily result in a large realtime improvement (roughly 10% in the app in question, eg. 1/10's of seconds on my development machine) but the change will definitely effect scalability in this type of application with large, changing, data sets.

Much more improvement in rendering speed occurs with changes to the pass through attribute rendering http://jira.icefaces.org/browse/ICE-3346

Re-assigning to Greg for further comment or resolution.

Changes have been commited correcting the reported issues with this fix.

Also see related fixes in ICE-3322.

Following issues were seen with comp-showcase ( latest 1.7 branch ) on
tomcat6.0 & tomcat5 (FF2 & IE7)

• Autocomplete not working (most of the times no list is shown)
• Menubar not working reliably (sometimes does not show child menus
  on mouse over or even onclick)
• Drag and Drop not working reliably (sometimes the item is not
  getting added to the cart after drag and drop also, sticky drag
  and drop)
• Panel popup not working reliable ( not able to drag it sometimes)

The serialize method in this method attempts to reduce the extreme number of calls to isAncestor for large Node counts.

The renderer implementation now avoids removing attributes from the targetNode since, in a clean DOM rendering situation, there wont be any pre-existing attributes.

I've attached two files that have improvements to their short term algorithms. They appear to help, offering about a 12.5% improvement in the customer testcase, but the changes also appear to have regressions in some unidentified form.