A TableView performance test case. Can you help?

I was wondering if you all might be able to help me fine tune the performance of a TableView for a commercial grade iOS application I'm working on. Perhaps other future developers would also benefit from this test case.

Below is the app.js file for a simple test project that contains nothing but a single table with 35 rows. The rows are fairly complex, containing 8 labels arranged in a way that pretty closely resembles the actual app I'm working on. I'm getting pretty poor performance on the iPhone 4 from this configuration -- especially when first scrolling the table, bringing rows in to view. If you first start the application and attempt to scroll quickly to the bottom there is huge, huge lag. Once all the rows have come in to view the performance is a lot better, but it still doesn't feel as smooth as other native applications such as ebay, facebook or godaddy, which use table rows of similar complexity.

A few things of note:

• All the TableViewRow objects share the exact same class name.
• I'm avoiding auto width or height whenever possible (though it is needed occasionally).
• I've tried to cut down the number of views I'm using, opting to absolutely position labels, rather than adding extra views with horizontal or vertical layouts.
• I tried to use an imageView but it crashed my application every time, so I had no other choice but to use a view with backgroundImage.
• I know that opaque labels perform better, but my final table will have even more graphic fidelity, such as images and a gradient, so all labels have to be transparent.

Anything else I should be doing? Any tips for perhaps pre-rendering the table and its rows so they are not cached and laggy? Thanks very much.

var win = Ti.UI.createWindow({  
    title:'Test',
});
 
var tableView = Ti.UI.createTableView({
    minRowHeight: 75
});
win.add(tableView);
 
var rows = [];
for (var i = 0; i < 35; i++) {
    rows.push(createRow());
}
 
function createRow() {
    var row = Ti.UI.createTableViewRow({
        left: 0,
        right: 0,
        top: 0,
        bottom: 0,
        className: 'className',
        layout: 'horizontal'
    });
 
    // Main left container.
    var leftView = Ti.UI.createView({
        left: 10,
        top: 10,
        bottom: 0,
        width: 220
    });
    row.add(leftView);
 
    leftView.add(Ti.UI.createView({
        top: 0,
        left: 0,
        height: 16,
        width: 16,
        backgroundImage: 'images/test.png'
    }));
 
    leftView.add(Ti.UI.createLabel({
        text: 'Big font, longer text',
        top: 0,
        height: 20,
        width: 'auto',
        left: 25,
        font: {fontSize: 16, fontWeight: 'bold'}
    }));
 
    leftView.add(Ti.UI.createLabel({
        text: 'Small 1',
        top: 25,
        left: 25,
        height: 15,
        font: {fontSize: 12, fontWeight: 'bold'}
    }));
 
    leftView.add(Ti.UI.createLabel({
        text: 'Small 2',
        top: 40,
        left: 25,
        height: 15,
        font: {fontSize: 12}
    }));
 
    leftView.add(Ti.UI.createLabel({
        text: 'Small 3',
        top: 25,
        right: 0,
        height: 15,
        font: {fontSize: 12, fontWeight: 'bold'},
        width: 'auto'
    }));
 
    leftView.add(Ti.UI.createLabel({
        text: 'Small 4',
        top: 40,
        right: 0,
        height: 15,
        font: {fontSize: 12},
        width: 'auto'
    }));
 
    var rightView = Ti.UI.createView({
        left: 20,
        top: 10,
        bottom: 0,
        width: 'auto'
    });
    row.add(rightView);
 
    rightView.add(Ti.UI.createLabel({
        text: 'Small 4',
        top: 0,
        height: 20,
        width: 'auto',
        font: {fontSize: 13, fontWeight: 'bold'},
        textAlign: 'right'
    }));
 
    rightView.add(Ti.UI.createLabel({
        text: 'BIG',
        top: 20,
        height: 30,
        width: 'auto',
        font: {fontSize: 30, fontWeight: 'bold'}
    }));
 
    return row;
}
 
tableView.setData(rows);
 
win.open();

Yeah, this is super sad. I am experiencing the exact same problems as you. Got about 4 labels and an image view in each row and using class names. Same lagging behavior. It is very sad because every other part of Titanium works very well. It is a Titanium issue and not an issue with your code I´m afraid. I tried many combinations of row content and all lags, especially when using image views. Let´s hope that Appcelerator fixes these performance problems with tables before adding more features because they are such common content items in an app.

So should I mark the above gloomy answer as "best answer"? I'm really starting to wonder if Titanium is the tool for the job. At this point I'm pretty sure the average user is going to assume my app is NOT native, due to the extremely laggy scroll behavior. This is a pretty serious issue.

Any progress on this matter? I have the exact same performance problems with tableviews