Speeding up the list widget - did I find a way?

[BurningTreeC]

Hello,

I was tinkering around in the list widget's handleListChanges method and the base widget's refreshChildren method and found a way to reduce the amount of times children get (unnecessarily? I don't know) refreshed.

First of all I must say that I don't really understand why it's working.

On first render of a list widget I set this.isFirstRender to true and set it to false after handleListChanges has run through.
In the base widget's refreshChildren method I do the following:

Widget.prototype.isEven = function(number) {
	return number % 2 === 0;
};

/*
Refresh all the children of a widget
*/
Widget.prototype.refreshChildren = function(changedTiddlers) {
	var children = this.children,
		refreshed = false,
		childRefreshed = false;
	for (var i = 0; i < children.length; i++) {
		childRefreshed = children[i].refresh(changedTiddlers) || this.isEven(i);
		refreshed = childRefreshed || refreshed;
	}
	this.hasRefreshed = childRefreshed;
	return refreshed;
};

This is to get this.hasRefreshed available in the list widget. Here's the check this.isEven(i) which is needed as I found out but I don't know why.

After this in the list widget's handleListChanges method where it's about to refresh the child widgets I do the following:

var refreshed = (!this.isFirstRender && !this.children[t].hasRefreshed && hasRefreshed) || this.children[t].refresh(changedTiddlers);

Again, don't ask me why it's working altogether. The variable names may also be misleading.

But this reduces the mainRefresh by a big amount if there are for example many tiddlers open.

What do you think? Is this worth exploring?
Can you tell me why and how this works?

Thank you,
Simon

[BurningTreeC]

Oh, I've found that this causes problems