Benchmark: parent vs closest 2

HTML Preparation code:

<span class="span">
  <div>
    <div id='it'>
    </div>
  </div>
</span>

Script Preparation code:

var it = document.getElementById("it");

Tests:

parentElement
while (it.className.indexOf("span") === -1) { it = it.parentElement; }
closest tag
it.closest('span')
closest class
it.closest('.span')
closest tag class
it.closest('span.span')
parentNode
while (it.className.indexOf("span") === -1) { it = it.parentNode; }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
parentElement
closest tag
closest class
closest tag class
parentNode

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 3 years ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.114 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 89 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
parentElement	6331950.0 Ops/sec
closest tag	3777647.8 Ops/sec
closest class	3701023.0 Ops/sec
closest tag class	3351378.0 Ops/sec
parentNode	6565523.5 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 2 months ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's dive into the benchmark and explain what's being tested, compared, and the pros/cons of different approaches.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark is designed to compare the performance of three methods for traversing an element's parent hierarchy in HTML:

1. `parentElement` (native JavaScript method)
2. `closest` with a tag name (`"span"` or a class name `.span`)
3. `closest` with a class name only (`".span"`)

**Native JavaScript Method: `parentElement`**

This is the native JavaScript method for traversing an element's parent hierarchy. It returns the closest ancestor element that matches the specified node type.

Pros:

* Fast and lightweight, as it uses a single property access.
* Works well with most HTML elements and their attributes.

Cons:

* May not work correctly if there are multiple elements with the same class name or tag name, as it only searches for the first match.
* Not designed to handle complex CSS selectors or attribute-based matching.

**Method 1: `closest` with a Tag Name**

This method uses the `closest` method of the element object, passing a string with a specific tag name (`"span"`). This allows for more precise control over the search criteria.

Pros:

* Can handle multiple elements with different class names or attributes.
* Works well with CSS selectors that target specific elements by name.

Cons:

* May be slower than `parentElement` due to the additional method call and string concatenation.
* Less flexible than using a CSS selector, as it requires specifying the exact tag name.

**Method 2: `closest` with a Class Name Only**

This method uses the `closest` method of the element object, passing a single class name (`".span"`). This provides a more concise way to search for elements by class name.

Pros:

* Faster than using `closest` with a tag name, as it avoids the additional method call.
* More flexible than specifying exact tag names, but less precise than using CSS selectors.

Cons:

* May not work correctly if there are multiple elements with different class names or attribute values.
* Less reliable than using CSS selectors that target specific elements by class name.

**Library Used: None**

In this benchmark, no external libraries are used. The methods being compared rely solely on the native JavaScript DOM API and CSS selectors.

**Special JS Feature/Syntax: None**

There are no special JavaScript features or syntax used in these test cases. They only utilize standard JavaScript concepts and DOM APIs.

**Benchmark Results**

The latest benchmark results show that:

* `parentElement` is the fastest, followed closely by `closest class`. These two methods are likely optimized for performance due to their simplicity.
* `closest tag` and `closest tag class` are slower than the previous two methods, but still relatively fast. This suggests that using a CSS selector or attribute-based matching can be efficient.

**Alternative Approaches**

Other alternative approaches could include:

* Using CSS selectors to traverse the DOM (e.g., `span > *`)
* Using a library like jQuery or document.querySelector() for more complex DOM traversal
* Implementing custom algorithms for traversing the DOM, potentially using caching or memoization to improve performance.

However, these alternatives may introduce additional complexity, overhead, or dependencies that could impact performance and maintainability.

Related benchmarks:

parent vs closest 2 (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: parentElement vs closest tag vs closest class vs closest tag class vs parentNode

Created: 3 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

parentElement

closest tag

closest class

closest tag class

parentNode

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 2 months ago):