Performance of D3 treemap with large amounts of data
If simply loading the json is too heavy for the browser, then doing a complete rendering server-side would not help, as the rendered object would one way or another include the same amount of data.
But I guess you cannot show that much data at once. Since you are going for a zoomable visualizer, you should probably only load the data that is visible at the current scale, within the current window (just like any map application does: you can't just load the whole world-map at street level at once, but zooming can still go smoothly). Quadtrees are normally quite useful for this task.
So my issue is that I'm passing a large JSON file (I'm not sure of the exact size, but it's very very big) into a D3 zoomable treemap. 
I'm doing this by way of AJAX call to a Python backend. The performance of my browser just degrades completely when I load the file in, it takes 5-10 mins for it to even appear. 
I'm just wondering are there any options that will help with performance? Rendering it server side perhaps?
This is the first ever time I've run into a performance issue like this so I'm really not sure where to go. Any help would be appreciated.