This is pretty much what we use, here it is with map and builds the element prior to dom insertion (better performance): https://gist.github.com/2932520
I'm curious - where did you hear that it was better performance? Or is this personal experience?
Found this S.O thread http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10296791/backbone-js-perf... (different code, same concept) and decided to benchmark: Unqueued DOM insertion: http://jsfiddle.net/arkxp/9/ Queued DOM insertion: http://jsfiddle.net/arkxp/8/
The latter is consistently faster, and while the difference isn't a lot with this example, given a more complex insertion it'll mount up.
There's at least two projects I have going at the day job which have been experiencing slowdown - and I had no idea that small-batch DOM interaction was the culprit.
Looks like I've got some optimizin' to do.