Benchmark: getElementById vs getElementsByClassName V2

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="testdiv">
  <div id="unique" class="unique" name="unique" data-unique="1">test</div>
</div>

Script Preparation code:

var i, imax;
var doc = document;

Tests:

getElementById
var test = doc.getElementById('unique');
getElementsByClassName
var test = doc.getElementsByClassName('unique')[0]

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
getElementById
getElementsByClassName

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark json and explain what is tested, compared options, pros/cons, and other considerations.

**What is being tested:**

The benchmark tests two different approaches to retrieve a single DOM element:

1. `getElementById`: This method retrieves an element by its id attribute.
2. `getElementsByClassName` (specifically, `[0]`, which returns the first element): This method retrieves elements that match a specific class name.

**Options being compared:**

The benchmark compares the performance of these two approaches in retrieving a single DOM element.

**Pros and Cons:**

1. `getElementById`:
	* Pros:
		+ Faster (according to the provided benchmark results)
		+ More efficient, as it only retrieves one element
	* Cons:
		+ May not work if multiple elements have the same id attribute
		+ Can be less intuitive for developers who are familiar with `getElementsByClassName`
2. `getElementsByClassName` (`[0]`):
	* Pros:
		+ More flexible, as it can retrieve all elements with a specific class name (if needed)
		+ Works even if multiple elements have the same id attribute
	* Cons:
		+ Slower (according to the provided benchmark results)
		+ May be overkill for retrieving a single element

**Library and purpose:**

In the provided benchmark, no external library is used. The test code only uses the built-in JavaScript DOM methods.

**Special JS feature or syntax:**

None of the special features or syntax are mentioned in the benchmark. However, it's worth noting that `getElementsByClassName` returns an array-like object, so when retrieving a single element using `[0]`, we're essentially returning the first (and only) element from the array.

**Other alternatives:**

For retrieving a single DOM element, other approaches might include:

1. Using `querySelector` or `querySelectorAll` with a CSS selector
2. Implementing a custom solution using a simple loop to iterate over the elements and find the matching one

Keep in mind that these alternatives would likely introduce additional overhead and may not be as efficient as the two methods being compared.

The provided benchmark is designed to help developers understand the performance differences between `getElementById` and `getElementsByClassName` when retrieving a single DOM element.

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/92.0.4515.107 Safari/537.36 Edg/92.0.902.62

Browser/OS: Chrome 92 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
getElementById	7349160.5 Ops/sec
getElementsByClassName	4348753.5 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

getElementById vs getElementsByClassName V2 (version: 0)

Test performance of different ways of get just one particular DOM element

Comparing performance of: getElementById vs getElementsByClassName

Created: 3 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

getElementById

getElementsByClassName

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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