Population.

miles_rich

Back to these darn drop down lists.

Ok i have to load a database field into a drop down list, there are over 100 entries that have to be loaded into this list, and there are 14 lists which are sort of the same. As you can imagine this is really memory consuming and the page wont load with out me increasing my virtual memory, is this caused by the loading of th list boxes?? and if so how would i stop this from happening??

Tony 🙁

sarahk

It's hard in development to separate them but I'm assuming the memory problem is in the server part of the process not the browser part.

I would be surprised if a browser had memory problems with your page.

So, if the server is having problems then I'd look really closely at your query. Are you running unnecessary joins? do you have any indexes you need? Are you creating the html in the best possible way. Yes, it's alot of data but in your environment you've only got one user, wait until your site gets some traffic!

Do the drop downs really, really need to be generated from the database? Can they be cached and updated daily or weekly? If this was so you could create a text file with just the <select> bit in there and then include that each time you need it. Then at regular intervals you could visit another page which generates the file. When things really settle down you could create a cron job to generate the file for you.

HTH

Weedpacket

Originally posted by sarahk
Do the drop downs really, really need to be generated from the database? Can they be cached and updated daily or weekly?

One thing I can't help asking: do they really really need to contain 100+ entries (especially if they're "all sort of the same")? Can they not be separated somehow?

All in all: are you sure you're going about this whole thing the right way? 😉

miles_rich

the drop downs all have to be there with all the data in them, because they are different places, they cannot be grouped in any way that i can think of because each one has its own value.

Chers for the help though.
- Tony

Weedpacket

Originally posted by miles_rich
the drop downs all have to be there with all the data in them, because they are different places, they cannot be grouped in any way that i can think of because each one has its own value.

Chers for the help though.
- Tony

So what needs 100+ entries in a dropdown? Mayhap some more abstract thinking about how the site is constructed is needed 🙁

Then again, I don't see how selecting a mere 100 items from a database will cause such a heavy demand. Perhaps if you posted the offending code someone might spot something.