I'm developing a web application. In this application we want to load the following data in a web page:
10,000 records.
3 fields in every record
Each record 35 byte in size
For all 10,000 records 350 KB total.
Sample record: 10102018abcdefghijkl0123456789012345
First field: 10102018
Second field: abcdefghijkl
Third field: 0123456789012345

We loaded the above records in to browser with following results:
1) OS : Ubuntu Linux version 12.04
BROWSER : FireFox
RECORDS: 10,000 as above
TIME TO LOAD: 40 seconds
We repeated the same test as follows also:
2)OS: Windows
BROWSER : FireFox
RECORDS:10,000 as above
TIME TO LOAD: 40 seconds
Even though the browser took 40 seconds to load the 10,000 records, the browser was able to show the records and we were able to do Edit, Delete, Add records.

To find out if Gmail can handle the same 10,000 records, Gmail being an application done by a well established corporation like Google, we copied and pasted the same 10,000 records and sent an email. The email was sent to same email account.
Time to send email: 44.67 seconds after clicking the Send button.
After receiving the email in the same account, we opened the email which showed the first 256 records only.
There was a hyperlink that said: "View entire message"
When clicked on the hyperlink it opened a new tab in the browser, in which it displayed all the 10,000 records in a read only format. This tab did not allow editing of the records.

Then, we forwarded this email. This time we clicked on the records in the email to find out if gmail can handle editing of any of the 10,000 records.
The browser hung up. We could not go to other pages in other tabs. We had to kill the browser.
So, we concluded that Gmail can not handle 10,000 records. We forwarded this email to the same account. It took 44 seconds to send the email.
In our Gmail test we loaded 35 character per record x 10,000 records = 350000 char. Gmail could not handle any text editing of it.

Our request:
1)Are there official limitations on how much text information a browser can present in a single web page?
2)So, at this point should we simply limit the number of records we load at a time within the 8 seconds that it usually takes for an user to run out of patience?
3)What are the steps we could take to make the browser handle 10,000 records within, say, 15 seconds?
4) For editing another table, we would like to load 10,000 records where each record is 390 Bytes in length for a total of 3.9 MB.
Are our objectives reasonable in today's browser technology?

Kindly give us your valuable feeddback.

Sincerely,
Heartly.

1)Are there official limitations on how much text information a browser can present in a single web page?

The browser can load a page as long as it has memory. Once the memory is gone, you're going to see issues loading a page.

2)So, at this point should we simply limit the number of records we load at a time within the 8 seconds that it usually takes for an user to run out of patience?

This is what "pagination" was created for. You should be using it to limit the number of records on a page at any one time. Hopefully you are using some server side language and pulling he records from a database.

3)What are the steps we could take to make the browser handle 10,000 records within, say, 15 seconds?

Pagination again.

4) For editing another table, we would like to load 10,000 records where each record is 390 Bytes in length for a total of 3.9 MB. Are our objectives reasonable in today's browser technology?

If you were to use pagination, you would not have to measure each record down to the byte. It would make your job a lot easier.

To find out if Gmail can handle the same 10,000 records, Gmail being an application done by a well established corporation like Google, we copied and pasted the same 10,000 records and sent an email. The email was sent to same email account.
Time to send email: 44.67 seconds after clicking the Send button.

Gmail took 44 seconds because it is forwarding mail using SMTP protocol,not because it takes time to load.

After receiving the email in the same account, we opened the email which showed the first 256 records only.
There was a hyperlink that said: "View entire message"

This actually is a feature of gmail to show only limited data.Like pixelsoul has described above pagination,similarly gmail has feature to show some characters to enhance initial loading time.

So, we concluded that Gmail can not handle 10,000 records. We forwarded this email to the same account. It took 44 seconds to send the email.

Wrong conclusion,gmail can handle but might be your browser cannot support,so it crashed.

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