Hi

I'm trying to find an efficient way of creating tables or grids with small cells, probably with a maximum of a 100 rows and 100 columns. Each cell 2 or 3 pixels high and wide.

It's not the looping I'm having problem with, it's the length of time it takes to load the page that's a big problem. I've tried tables, divs and also creating an image in php with GD and draw what I want on that.

I'm looking to display like a radar/map of an area displaying different colours in the cells to represent certain things. When I do a 10 x 10 grid it's almost instant, it starts to really slow down after that.

Any one have any ideas/ methods that might load quicker than others? I can go with 10 x 10 but when I have a board of a million squares in a database (1000 x 1000) it'll be good to be able to show mini maps of larger sections.

I appreciate the fact that I'm accessing the database each cell probably isn't helping much but when it's almost instant with a 10 x 10 table it seems like it's more of a problem with how I'm drawing the map/ table.

Sorry I've got no code as I'm at work, but it's just a 9 or 10 line program at the moment with the loops and code to access the database and display accordingly.

Thanks

Kevin

Well, would you be able to switch all of the data over to an XML file and then access it with Javascript? I think that it would be faster to load, and it would take more load off the server.

Can it be switched to XML dynamically via php? I've not actually done that before but might look into it.

I've managed to create a 100 small tables all with 10 rows and 10 columns and I've cleaned the code so that it only accesses the database once before it goes into the loop, storing a small part of the million database rows in an array and using that in my loops.

The page load averages at 10 seconds now, which isn't too bad, especially when the page loads and displays progressively so that you can see it's loading and are therefore less likely to move away from the page.

without seing the code i don't think we can help you to optimizing it