Can't remember where I heard it, so decided to check.

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.