Benchmark: remove firstChild vs remove lastChild

HTML Preparation code:

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

Script Preparation code:

var container = document.getElementById('container');

Tests:

remove firstChild
while (container.firstChild) { container.firstChild.remove(); }
remove lastChild
while (container.lastChild) { container.lastChild.remove(); }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
remove firstChild
remove lastChild

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Sumamry (model llama3.2:3b, generated 3 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's dive into the benchmark and explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark is designed to compare the performance of two approaches for removing child nodes from a DOM container: `removeFirstChild` and `removeLastChild`. The test creates a container element with three child elements, and then repeatedly removes each child using these two methods while looping through the children.

**Options Compared**

There are two options being compared:

1. **removeFirstChild**: This method removes the first child node from the container.
2. **removeLastChild**: This method removes the last child node from the container.

**Pros and Cons of Each Approach**

* `removeFirstChild`:
	+ Pros: Can be more efficient if the container has a large number of children, as it only needs to process the first child.
	+ Cons: If the container has an empty child list or only one child, this method can throw an error. Additionally, it may not be as cache-friendly as `removeLastChild`.
* `removeLastChild`:
	+ Pros: Can be more efficient if the container is empty or only has one child, as it avoids the overhead of checking for multiple children.
	+ Cons: May require more iterations to process all children, especially in cases where the container has a large number of children.

**Library and Purpose**

There is no specific library being used in this benchmark. However, it's worth noting that `removeChild` (the method called in the benchmark) is a standard DOM API method for removing child nodes from an element.

**Special JS Features/Syntax**

This benchmark does not use any special JavaScript features or syntax beyond the standard DOM API methods. It's designed to be straightforward and easy to understand, making it accessible to a wide range of software engineers.

**Other Alternatives**

If you were to write this benchmark yourself, you could consider using different approaches to compare performance. Some alternatives might include:

* Using `Array.prototype.shift()` instead of `removeFirstChild` to remove the first child node.
* Implementing your own loop and node removal logic for both methods.
* Adding additional variations, such as removing multiple children at once or processing a large number of containers.

**Benchmark Result Explanation**

The benchmark result shows two tests: `remove lastChild` and `remove firstChild`. The "Raw UA String" field provides information about the browser and device being used to run the test (in this case, Chrome 108 on Linux). The "Executions Per Second" field measures how many executions of each method are performed per second.

The results show that `removeLastChild` is slightly faster than `removeFirstChild`, with approximately 165,730,046 executions per second compared to 165,076,669. However, it's essential to note that these results may vary depending on the specific hardware and software environment being used to run the benchmark.

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: one year ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/108.0.1462.46

Browser/OS: Chrome 108 on Linux

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
remove firstChild	16507670.0 Ops/sec
remove lastChild	16573050.0 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

remove firstChild vs remove lastChild (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: remove firstChild vs remove lastChild

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

remove firstChild

remove lastChild

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Sumamry (model llama3.2:3b, generated 3 days ago):