Faster calendar screen, yay!

We released a change this morning to the calendar screen, which makes it a lot faster. To be honest, it was starting to feel like our dirty little secret: the more bookings you added, the slower the calendar screen got, until with a few hundred bookings in a single month it got horribly, grindingly slow to load.

There's only so much small talk you can make with a guest while you wait for the calendar to load so you can check if you actually have a room for them.

But now you'll have about 5.03 seconds to make small talk. That's how long it now takes for FireFox to render the calendar screen when it has 200 bookings in a single month. Chrome is about the same. Internet Explorer, inevitably, trails a long way behind (although Internet Explorer 9 manages a very respectable 6 seconds).

If you are interested in the geeky detail, the most significant change we made was to load the hover information (the booking details which appear when you hover over a booking) later. So the calendar renders first, so you can quickly check availability. Then the hover text is loaded a few seconds later.