Thanks for looking into the performance of this demo.

Your most significant change is the localApply = false for the call to $timeout with a local digest. I specifically chose not to do that for this demo because this was meant to simulate an AJAX request with $http, which does not provide a localApply feature.

This demo was meant to be representative of Angular apps in general, which are usually not designed to keep track of which scopes changed, because Angular 1 encourages global digest.

TL;DR As you show, Angular 1 is not inherently slow. This demo, along with virtually any Angular 1 app, could be optimized to be fast, but app developers would have to depart from idiomatic Angular code to do so.

@lgalfaso Also, did you see any improvement to the initial load speed with these changes? I do not.

Agreed on all points.

This demo showed two things:

1. Initial DOM loading in Angular 1 is slow.
2. Global digests are slow.

I think it showed those points well enough, and while there are good solutions for #2, there are basically no solutions for #1 to my knowledge. Do you know of any?