Is there an upper limit on the number of divs in a document before performance is degraded?

I'm working on a site that will be showing a lot of information via divs. Its basically a chart out of divs. The way its setup is I've got an outer div with a set size that you can scroll the contents around (click and drag like google maps).

From here I can 2 ways of going, have 1 large inner div that is moved around with all the chart divs within it. This would be by far the easiest approach. The other option I see is a tiled approach where I break the large inner div up into smaller divs and dynamically add/remove them as needed.

The chart itself is potenti开发者_Go百科ally 1999425014 pixels square. Each point is made up of 6 divs and there are 100,000+ points.

What would be the best way to move forward?

I believe most modern browsers render sections of pages only as needed. If the entire page fits in RAM, only the section that is currently visible is being drawn. I conclude this because large documents do not slow down my computer when I use other programs, but there is a bit of lag when I scroll across one. Plus, when the window is repainted through the operating system's APIs, only the pixels that are visible should be rendered. That would only make sense when designing it, anyway.

Surely you can fit as many as you want on a page without worrying about real-time performance hits, unless you're talking about scrolling. Rendering the document should take less time than retrieving it out of system memory and determining where the scroll bars are.

Best of luck, and merry Christmas.

-Tom