I'm playing out ionic and created a single page that has an ion-content which contains a slider box and several static images, in the slider box there are 5 relatively large images sliding to mimic the carousel effect on desktop webpages. The ion-content is set to scrollable and slider box set to automatically slide after 2 seconds. Problem is that everything when I scroll the ion-content, if the slider happens to be sliding, the scrolling becomes really laggy for both iOS and Android. I implemented the exact page using bootstrap+ jQuery, and everything Ames so smooth, I wonder if this is a general issue about ionic? More specifically, given ionic is still on its beta, I need some advice regards to its performance on mobile platforms? Thanks in advance.
I have been developing using Ionic and following each nightly over the last month (from b13 to b14), and I agree it does not have the performance you would expect, especially when using sliders in the current versions.
Two things to consider for the future are:
Sliders are being completely redone for release 1.0. The new sliders made a brief appearance in the nightlies, but were taken out again since the developers did not feel happy about the result. In my experience the new version was significantly faster and required a lot less memory than what is currently available. So once the developers get the new slider code done, expect this to improve things a lot.
For Android, scrolling is currently done by the Ionic code itself in JS. This will be replaced by calling Android builtin scrolling events instead, which should smooth up the scrolling a lot. No effect on iPhones however, but performace is a bit better there already...
More info here: http://ionicframework.com/blog/the-final-beta/
To improve performance you can use: CROSSWALK which replaces Android's default WebView. You can learn more here: https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-cli in section Crosswalk for Android.
Downside of this solution is that app size increases (in my case 37mb) but still the performance on slower Android devices is much better!