DOM Table with more than 1000 rows and 256 columns

We are trying to develop a web-based spreadsheet application. Currently it is taking over a minute to build a dom table with 500 rows and 256 columns with static data in it. Our goal is to be able to display upto 32000 rows and 256 columns of data to the user, without waiting an eternity for it to load in the browser.

Our standard is Mozilla 1.5 and IE 6.0. Also the time taken to create the dom table above was on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ running Redhat 8.0. On checking the system monitor we saw that the CPU usage was 100%.

We need help to make the dom execution faster, so that the table may be created in lesser time.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

And you're doing this in javascript? There's no way, javascript or not, that you'll be able to display 32000 rows and 256 columns quickly. I wrote a quick PHP script that does nothing but print a bare-bones table containing very little data and that doesn't even hit a database, and it took 2.5 minutes to print out 2000 rows of 256 columns, bringing my desktop system to its knees. And this is on a quad-processor, gigabyte Web server.

Thanks for your reply.
We have to develop a web-based spreadsheet application within which we can see the data from MS EXCEL.
Then what is the best that we can do without taking lots of loading time and how do we go about it.

For huge data sets, the Web's really not your best bet, transfer being your biggest impediment. Perhaps you could optimize your page a bit by having a row threshold with "previous" and "next" links. That is, maybe you display 50 rows at a time but make the spreadsheet fully searchable and sortable and paginated. I'm still not sure how you're using javascript to do this.