[olifolkerd]

vDOMs do carry a fairly significant performance overhead and they are not worth using where there is only a small amount of data to be handled (which is why it can be turned of in Tabulator if not needed) but on modern browsers it isnt really something you should be noticing.

But when you start dealing with large volumes of data they quickly become the only option.

Even a plain html table with say 10 columns will crash out /massively slow down a browser if you load in 100,000 rows of data.

Browsers simply aren't able to process that may elements being added to the DOM.

In the case of Tabulator you can handle many thousands of rows because it only adds the rows you can see to the DOM, removing/adding them as you scroll.

So yes this means there is more processing when you scroll but at the same time you aren't trying to move 100,000 od DOM elements at once which reduces the load on the browser when loading/scrolling.

Depending on the complexity of what you are dealing with there becomes a point where the trade off in processing/memory usage makes it worthwile