Debouncing

Sashank Pindiproli — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 07:23:40 +0000

Debouncing is the most common interview question that is asked when applying for a Front-End developer position.

Why is it the hot favorite question?
Most of the companies have a search bar feature that allows the user to search for the products.
And when the user searches for a particular product, for each keystroke it will call the rest API and get the results. This will cause a lot of performance issues as there will be a lot of API calls and also change the DOM structure on each response from the API call.
So how do we handle this performance issue? This is where debouncing comes into the picture.

What is debouncing?
In layman terms, "Wait until the function hasn't been called for some time period." This prevents multiple API calls, simple yet effective performance improvement for the website.

let counter = 0;

const incrementCounter = () => {
   console.log(`Counter increased by :${counter++}`);
}

const debounce = (fn, delay) => {
  let timer;
  return () => {
    clearTimeout(timer);
    timer = setTimeout(() => {
      fn();
    }, delay);
  };
};

const debounceProductSearch = debounce(incrementCounter, 1000);
debounceProductSearch()

DEV Community: Sashank Pindiproli

Debouncing