Benchmark: innerhtml vs removechild

HTML Preparation code:

<select id="container"></select>

Script Preparation code:

var node = document.getElementById('container');

for(var i = 0; i < 300; i++) node.appendChild(document.createElement('option'));

Tests:

innerHTML
var node = document.getElementById('container'); node.innerHTML = '';
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
innerHTML
removeChild

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 27 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the benchmark and explain what's being tested, compared, and the pros and cons of each approach.

**Benchmark Overview**

The test case compares two JavaScript approaches for clearing the inner HTML of an HTML element: `innerHTML` and `removeChild`.

**Options Compared**

1. **innerHTML**: Sets the text content of an element by replacing its child nodes with a new string.
2. **removeChild**: Removes all child nodes from an element.

**Pros and Cons of Each Approach**

**innerHTML**

Pros:

* Simple and efficient way to set the text content of an element.
* Can be faster for small to medium-sized datasets, as it doesn't require removing individual child nodes.

Cons:

* Slower for large datasets, as it needs to create a new string with all child nodes.
* May not be suitable for situations where the element's structure needs to be preserved.

**removeChild**

Pros:

* Faster for large datasets, as it only removes each child node individually.
* Suitable for situations where the element's structure needs to be preserved.

Cons:

* More complex and error-prone than `innerHTML`.
* May be slower due to the overhead of removing individual child nodes.

**Library: None**

Neither of the two approaches uses any external libraries. However, it's worth noting that some browsers may provide optimized implementations for these operations in their JavaScript engines.

**Special JS Feature/Syntax: None**

There are no special JavaScript features or syntax used in this benchmark.

**Alternative Approaches**

Other alternatives for clearing the inner HTML of an element include:

1. **textContent**: Sets the text content of an element, similar to `innerHTML`, but more efficient for small datasets.
2. **outerHTML**: Sets the HTML representation of an element, which can be useful when preserving the element's structure.

In conclusion, this benchmark tests the performance difference between two simple yet distinct approaches for clearing the inner HTML of an HTML element: `innerHTML` and `removeChild`. The results indicate that `removeChild` is faster for large datasets, but may require more complex code.

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 7 years ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 60 on Mac OS X 10.12.6

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
innerHTML	385535.0 Ops/sec
removeChild	2702592.0 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

innerhtml vs removechild (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: innerHTML vs removeChild

Created: 7 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

innerHTML

removeChild

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 27 days ago):