So there’s a page on my site, https://www.doogal.co.uk/BatchGeocoding.php, that someone complained about. Specifically, they complained that if they tried to geocode 3,000 postcodes, it was terribly slow. I tried it myself and experienced the same problem. When geocoding postcodes, the page uses my own internal database, so it should suffer none of the throttling issues of Google Maps. No worries I thought, I can reproduce the problem, which is generally the biggest hurdle, fixing it should be straightforward.
So I fired up Chrome’s profiler and found… absolutely nothing… None of the delays were in my code. So I tried Microsoft Edge and it was super quick. I pretty much gave up at that point and suggested the user tried MS Edge.
Three weeks later I had a look with fresh eyes. And something popped up from the recesses of my mind, spellcheck=”false”. I vaguely remembered setting that attribute on a textarea in the past had improved performance and once again, this fixed the issue. A single geocode was previously taking a second, now all 3,000 took a couple of minutes. This may be a bug in Chrome or maybe spellchecking is a very CPU intensive process. Either way, turning it off makes everything better.
As always this is just a reminder for me and maybe it will be useful to someone passing through.
