On this page the carousel contains only a few photos to demonstrate the functionality, but it is able to take hundreds of photo's without really slowing down. Even on IE6. To get it so fast, I applied to following strategy:

• Walk the DOM as little and as fast as possible.
• Don't walk the DOM after initialization.
• Only manipulate the elements you need to manipulate to get the visuals you need.
• Rather fast low level JavaScript than jQuery.
• Smart bookkeeping.