How to Optimize Big Table with Many Forms

[shannona]

I've got some software that dynamically generates pages with tables on them.

Each row in the table contains:
* Two data cells, each with one text value
* Two data cells, each with a form and a select

This page worked fine when I started out, but it's proven to be very unwieldy (read: slow) for large data sets.

For example, a page with 1000 entries has 1000 TRs, four thousand TDs, 2000 FORMs, and 2000 SELECTs.

What's likely to be slowing down the page the most? The table itself, the selects, the forms, or some combination thereof? What will give me the best bang-for-the-buck in optimization?

This is an example of the page that's small enough to work well:
http://index.xenagia.net/display-user-collection.phtml?user=ShannonA&site=Xenagia

However, I suspect the answer is general, not page specific.

Thanks.

[drhowarddrfine]

Tables are slow to display but I forgot the reason. Something about calculating the final display size that takes so long.