Abstract

Modern web applications often display large datasets with tens of thousands of items, such as e-commerce catalogs, data tables, and social media feeds. Rendering all items in the Document Object Model (DOM) at once causes browser freezing, high memory use, and slow interfaces. Virtual scrolling solves this problem. It is widely adopted but rarely studied through direct performance comparison. Few empirical studies measure how different implementations behave under varying dataset sizes, devices, or browsers. This research conducts a comparative analysis of Angular CDK Virtual Scroll as an industry-standard baseline and develops an optimized implementation incorporating framework-specific enhancements: OnPush change detection strategy, runOutsideAngular zone management, BehaviorSubject-based data flow, and adaptive buffer sizing. Benchmarking covers datasets from 10,000 to over 100,000 items across multiple hardware configurations. The completed library, evaluated against Angular CDK across five scroll scenarios and three dataset sizes, demonstrates improved frame rate consistency at large dataset sizes (50,000–100,000 items) under sustained scrolling, with a 21.45% improvement in FPS standard deviation and a 6.40% reduction in aggregate P99 frame time. Results are mixed at smaller dataset sizes, where the CDK baseline performs equivalently or better. The library is approximately 3.4× smaller in bundle size than the CDK scrolling module and confirmed zero blank frames across a 225-frame visual stability probe.

Publication Date

4-2026

Document Type

Senior Project

Student Type

Undergraduate

Advisor

Blerta Prevalla-Etemi

Advisor/Committee Member

Valon Raca

Advisor/Committee Member

Muzafer Shala

Campus

RIT Kosovo

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