Large book breaks 'search'

[boatat72]

I have written a large book of lists, that looks like a dictionary. There are 50,000 entries with four lines each. I separated the lines with <br /> and the entries with <br /><br />. You can read the book, no problem, but using 'search' sends my Sony and Nook into a frenzy, and they both just 'hang'. The Nook eventually stops and shuts the book, the Sony needs a reset to get back to normal. This does not happen with Kindle or iPad.
I tried putting each entry in a <div> instead, still using breaks to separate the lines, but this makes no difference. - it does, see solution.
As an ePub the file is 1mb, converted to mobi by Calibre it is 5mb.
I have larger books than this that do not have this issue.
Anyone else had this problem or knows what I might be doing wrong?

Probable SOLUTION

All entries are now in a <div> with 3 <br /> and it does work, but very slowly in the Nook. 28 seconds to search the book. The Sony is still frozen so will test it on there when it gets back from repair. Seems to be my poor original structure was to blame.

[Toxaris]

I think you have everything in one HTML file, right? That will slow things down for sure... Split it up in multiple files and it will perform much better.

Also, <div> or <p> would be better. You could also try <dd> and <dt>, that seems to fit the purpose.

[boatat72]

Thanks for looking Toxaris.
The book is in 100 HTML files, each small enough that Calibre does not split them, otherwise I get page breaks where I don't want them. This makes it slow to open in Sigil as it goes through 'tidy' but I can live with that.
The book validates with the Sigil check and with the pagina EPUB Checker.

A typical entry now looks like

<div class="inset" style="text-align: left;">
<b>Old Place</b><br />
Location<br />
New Place<br />
Date of change
</div>

The class="inset" creates a margin. I could achieve the same effect by putting every single line in a <p>.
There would then be 200,000 <p>'s in the book, that's a lot of code.
Do you think this would this be worth the effort involved?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by boatat72

Thanks for looking Toxaris.
The book is in 100 HTML files, each small enough that Calibre does not split them, otherwise I get page breaks where I don't want them. This makes it slow to open in Sigil as it goes through 'tidy' but I can live with that.
The book validates with the Sigil check and with the pagina EPUB Checker.

A typical entry now looks like

<div class="inset" style="text-align: left;">
<b>Old Place</b><br />
Location<br />
New Place<br />
Date of change
</div>

The class="inset" creates a margin. I could achieve the same effect by putting every single line in a <p>.
There would then be 200,000 <p>'s in the book, that's a lot of code.
Do you think this would this be worth the effort involved?

<div or <p
similar except I don't think <div has default margins, but you don't care as you have controlled the style.

IMHO your example shows a reasonable condition of when to use <br instead of a new <p or <div