If it's not possible with setInterval, is there any alternative to this, without any modification in the "long to execute" code itself?
One possibility is to make that a web worker rather than trying to use it on the UI thread. Despite people repeatedly saying so, JavaScript is not single-threaded (JavaScript, the language, is silent on the subject), not even on browsers anymore. In the browser environment, there is one main UI thread, but you can spawn other worker threads (web workers). The worker(s) and the main UI code can communicate via postMessage
/ onmessage
.
Here's an example of a web worker in action. This page uses JavaScript on the UI thread to start a web worker, which runs on a separate thread. The worker runs for 10 seconds, busily updating a counter (this is just to simulate a long-running, calculation-intensive process), and sends updates to the UI thread every second:
Main page:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Worker Example</title>
<style type="text/css">
body {
font-family: sans-serif;
}
</style>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<script>
(function() {
var worker = new Worker("worker.js");
worker.onmessage = function(e) {
display("Worker says " + e.data);
};
display("Starting worker");
worker.postMessage("start");
function display(msg) {
var p = document.createElement('p');
p.innerHTML = String(msg);
document.body.appendChild(p);
}
})();
</script>
</body>
</html>
worker.js:
this.onmessage = function(e) {
var counter, lastUpdate, now;
if (e.data === "start") {
// Loop without yeilding for 10 seconds, sending updates
// to the UI every second.
start = lastUpdate = Date.now();
counter = 0;
do {
++counter;
now = Date.now();
if (now - lastUpdate > 1000) {
lastUpdate = now;
this.postMessage(counter);
}
}
while (now - start < 10000);
this.postMessage("Done");
}
};
(You're not required to make the worker wait for a message to start, but it's fairly common.)