Also not a direct answer to your question, but maybe an answer to why you are asking it...
My initial guess would be that because you are just using a class as your selector it is having to search through every single element on the page (apparently over 20,000 of them) to find the elements that have that class. That takes a little while. Your form.select selector looks for form elements of which I am sure there are just a few, and then a select element inside of that... again just a few. In other words, the less work your selector has to do, the faster it runs. You could speed this up even more if you gave the element an ID as that is even less parsing that it needs to do as there should only ever be one of a given ID. Hope that helps! Aaron On Feb 20, 9:13 am, Adam Schaible <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > On my page, I have a select element that may contain 20,000+ > options. When I ask jQuery for the select element, it loads the set > of options with it. For 20,000 it takes about 1 - 1.25 seconds for > jQuery to return from $('.boxClass)[0];. When I use standard > form.select it takes roughly 300 milliseconds. > > Is there a way to lazy load the options of a select?