Hi,
I completely understand performance problems you are facing with InfoPath when large forms are in play. I have developed some forms for my company which contain about 3500 fields each! In fact, about 1500 are actually being used for entering data, and others are read only. InfoPath has some serious problems when such scenarios are in play.
Not to go into details further, here are some of my experiences:
- Field (attributes) are performance killers! - Make sure you are not using a lot of attributes in your data structure to/from which you read/write! For some reason, any operation on the form takes a lot longer, if your data structure contains large number of attributes.
- Conditional formatting can slow down your form! If you use a lot of conditional formatting it may create performance issues. For example, if ou have 10 checkboxes and want to disable some of them when one is clicked it will, from my experience approx. double the time from clicking to the point when formatting is completely applied. I guess this could be the case for you, since you are using multiple repeating tables in one view which is also in a way formatting. Maybe the solution would be to split them in multiple views and test your performance.
- Multiple rules can also create performance issues. Especially if they trigger other rules and conditional formatting on other fields and controls.
- Machine. I noticed that performance is highly dependant on the machine. I develop on 2,2 dual core processor and 2Gb RAM. Comparing with Intel Atom 1,6, 1GB (netbook), it takes 2 seconds more for certain actions to perform on the second machine.
Of course, the worse thing is when you have mix up of all of these, as it was in my case. I suggest you do some profiling on your view, by removing certain functionalities, and measuring performance. That way you will be able to determine what exactly slows it down.
Good luck!