Benchmark: textContent vs removechild

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="container"></div>

Script Preparation code:

var node = document.getElementById('container');

for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) node.appendChild(document.createElement('div'));

Tests:

textContent
var node = document.getElementById('container'); node.textContent = '';
removeChild
var node = document.getElementById('container'); while(node.firstChild) node.removeChild(node.firstChild)

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
textContent
removeChild

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 benchmark and analyze what's being tested.

**Benchmark Purpose**

The benchmark is comparing two JavaScript methods: `textContent` and `removeChild`. The purpose of this benchmark is to determine which method is faster for clearing the content of an HTML element.

**Options Compared**

There are only two options being compared:

1. **`textContent`**: This method sets the text content of an element without replacing its children.
2. **`removeChild`**: This method removes all child nodes from an element, allowing you to start with a clean slate.

**Pros and Cons**

Here's a brief summary of the pros and cons of each approach:

* `textContent`:
	+ Pros: Faster, as it only updates the text content without removing children.
	+ Cons: If the element has complex child nodes or attributes, this method might not be suitable.
* `removeChild`:
	+ Pros: More flexible, as it removes all child nodes, but slower due to the additional work.
	+ Cons: Slower than `textContent`, especially for large datasets.

**Library and Special JS Feature**

There is no specific library being used in this benchmark. However, note that modern JavaScript engines, including V8 (used by Chrome), have implemented various optimizations for these methods, such as:

* `textContent`: V8's text node optimization allows it to update text content more efficiently.
* `removeChild`: V8's garbage collection and DOM manipulation optimizations help with removing child nodes.

**Other Considerations**

When choosing between `textContent` and `removeChild`, consider the following factors:

* **Complexity of child nodes**: If your element has simple child nodes, `textContent` might be sufficient. However, if you have complex child nodes (e.g., tables, forms), `removeChild` is a safer choice.
* **Data size**: For large datasets, `removeChild` might be slower due to the additional work involved in removing all child nodes.

**Alternatives**

Other alternatives for clearing an HTML element's content include:

* Using the `innerHTML` property, which sets both the text and HTML content of an element. However, this can lead to security issues if used with user-input data.
* Creating a new element and replacing the old one using DOM manipulation.
* Using a library like jQuery or another JavaScript framework that provides optimized methods for clearing elements.

Keep in mind that these alternatives might have their own trade-offs and performance characteristics, so it's essential to evaluate them based on your specific use case.

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 2 years ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/95.0.4638.54 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 95 on Linux

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
textContent	1076259.2 Ops/sec
removeChild	5336488.5 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

textContent vs removechild (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: textContent vs removeChild

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

textContent

removeChild

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):