Topic awaiting preservation: word counter script slows down when counting a lot of words (Page 1 of 1)

Greets!
http://development.runningwolf.com/code/javascript/word_counter/ is the page I'm dealing with. Basically, a dynamic word counter script that counts the number of words in a form field. The problem is that as the number (to, say 600 or so), the entire script just comes to a crawl.

I'm looking to optimize this so that it's not such a hog. Ideas?

Try this: http://www.max.co.yu/ozone/word_counter.html

BTW Besides for loop which is seriously slowing this thing (because it has to go through every character on each change), another thing that slows it are two events onkeydown & onkeyup that call it twice (which is unnecessary). On the other hand, my version uses a different approach, it's not 100% optimized, but it is noticeably faster than yours...