I haven’t tested the following claim and not at the computer atm (^U, see below), but divs must be cheap. They’re just structures which a rendering engine walks through and computes hierarchical offsets of via stylesheets.

I’m not arguing for using hundreds of divs, because that’s a sign of engineering insanity imo, but it’s not a performance issue. You can create a static page with thousands of them and (likely) see that it still doesn’t use 250Mb+ neither idles at 30% cpu core.

Added:

damn thing keeps messing with the DOM … web frontend is an insane dumpster fire.

Totally agree with these parts.

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… I just tested 50 div-rows with 200 spans containing numbers from 1 to 199. Total 10k elements, text doesn’t fit on the screen. Bootstrap css+js is imported via CDN.

Mithril.js implementation uses 50Mb of RAM consistently.

A static page with the exact same content uses 71-96Mb depending on the run.

Both use 5-14% cpu when I shake my mouse and 0% when I don’t.

Refresh is significantly faster with Mithril, idk why, probably because static html parser is slow. (Opera, Windows 10, no extensions).

With a single span per row instead of 200 both take 23Mb.

Removing bootstrap from the head inconsistently frees 0-2Mb for both.