Benchmark: createElement("span") vs cloneNode()

Tests:

createElement("span")
var list = [], n = 0; while(true) { n++; var span = document.createElement("span"); span.className = "random class name"; span.style.all = "unset"; list.push(span); if(n===100000) break; }
cloneNode()
var list = [], n = 0, node = document.createElement("span"); node.className = "random class name"; node.style.all = "unset"; while(true) { n++; var span = node.cloneNode(); list.push(span); if(n===100000) break; }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
createElement("span")
cloneNode()

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.127 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 100 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
createElement("span")	5.3 Ops/sec
cloneNode()	24.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark and its test cases.

**Benchmark Description**

The benchmark measures the performance of two approaches: creating an HTML element using `document.createElement()` versus cloning an existing element using `cloneNode()`.

**Test Case Options**

There are two test cases:

1. **createElement("span")**: This approach creates a new `<span>` element from scratch.
2. **cloneNode()**: This approach clones an already existing element (in this case, a newly created `<span>` element) to create a new copy of it.

**Pros and Cons**

* **createElement("span")**:
	+ Pros: Creates a new, distinct HTML element, which can be beneficial in scenarios where you need to manipulate the element's attributes or styles independently.
	+ Cons: Requires more resources (CPU and memory) since a new element is created from scratch, which can lead to slower performance for large numbers of elements.
* **cloneNode()**:
	+ Pros: Reuses an existing element, reducing the overhead of creating a new one. This approach is beneficial when you need to create multiple copies of the same element with the same attributes and styles.
	+ Cons: Creates a shallow copy of the original element, which means any changes made to the cloned element will also affect the original. Also, if the original element has a large number of children or complex structure, cloning it can be slower than creating a new one.

**Library and Purpose**

In this benchmark, `document` is used as a global object, which provides access to various DOM (Document Object Model) methods and properties. The `createElement()` method creates a new HTML element, while the `cloneNode()` method creates a shallow copy of an existing element.

**Special JavaScript Feature or Syntax**

There are no special features or syntaxes mentioned in this benchmark. However, it's worth noting that modern JavaScript engines have various optimizations and techniques to improve performance, such as just-in-time (JIT) compilation, caching, and speculative execution.

**Other Alternatives**

If you need to compare the performance of different HTML element creation approaches, you can consider other options:

* Using `HTMLFactory.create()` (Chrome-specific)
* Creating elements using a library like React or Angular
* Comparing the performance of server-side rendering versus client-side rendering

Keep in mind that these alternatives may have their own trade-offs and complexities, and might not be directly comparable to the `createElement()` and `cloneNode()` methods used in this benchmark.

Related benchmarks:

createElement("span") vs cloneNode() (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: createElement("span") vs cloneNode()

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

createElement("span")

cloneNode()

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):