#requestanimationframe

From my experience I don't see any benefits from using requestAnimationFrame for dragging -- it will just make your code more complicated. One of the benefits of requestAnimationFrame is this:

"...only call rAF when you have visual updates to do."

Going to give FastDom a spin

Layout Thrashing is when JavaScript violently writes, then reads, from the DOM, multiple times causing document reflows.

FastDom is a small library I wrote to provide a common interface for batching of DOM read/write work. It massively speeds up DOM work using similarrequestAnimationFrame techniques described above.

Implications of using FastDom

By using FastDom you are making all DOM tasks asynchronous, that means you can't always make assumptions as to what state the DOM will be in. Work that was previously sync, may not have completed now it is async.

To work around this I like to use an event system to be more explicit about when work has finished, and responding only when I know DOM work I'm dependent on is complete.

Also we are increasing the amount of code we have to write to effectively get the same amount of work done. Personally I think this is a small price to pay for a dramatic increase in performance.