Benchmark: innerhtml vs removechild vs remove #0000 (No first child)

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:

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

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
innerHTML
removeChild
remove

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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/107.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 107 on Linux

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
innerHTML	2569232.8 Ops/sec
removeChild	3189212.0 Ops/sec
remove	3185584.2 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 explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark compares three different approaches to clear an HTML element:

1. `innerHTML`
2. `removeChild` (removing the first child node)
3. `remove`

These approaches are used to measure their performance in clearing a large number of elements from an HTML container.

**Library Used**

In this benchmark, no external libraries are explicitly mentioned. However, it's worth noting that the `document.getElementById`, `appendChild`, and `removeChild` methods are part of the standard JavaScript DOM API.

**Options Compared**

The three options being compared are:

1. **innerHTML**: Setting the HTML content of an element to an empty string.
2. **removeChild**: Removing the first child node from the element using the `removeChild` method.
3. **remove**: Removing the element itself from the DOM using the `remove` method.

**Pros and Cons**

Here's a brief summary of each approach:

* **innerHTML**:
	+ Pros: Simple and widely supported.
	+ Cons: Can be slower due to the need to parse and reformat the HTML content. Additionally, it can cause issues with CSS styles and event listeners attached to child nodes.
* **removeChild**: 
	+ Pros: Efficient for removing single or multiple child nodes without affecting other parts of the document.
	+ Cons: Requires iterating over child nodes, which can be slower for large datasets.
* **remove**:
	+ Pros: Can remove the entire element from the DOM in a single operation, avoiding potential issues with child node iteration.
	+ Cons: May not be supported by older browsers or specific use cases.

**Special JS Features/Syntax**

None of these approaches rely on special JavaScript features or syntax beyond standard DOM API methods. The benchmark is designed to test the performance of basic HTML manipulation techniques.

**Alternatives**

Other alternatives for clearing elements could include:

* Using `innerHTML` with a string replacement, like `.innerHTML = newDiv.outerHTML`
* Utilizing CSS to clear the element's content (e.g., `display: none;` or `visibility: hidden;`)
* Leveraging other DOM manipulation methods, such as `textContent` or `dataset`

Keep in mind that these alternatives might not be directly comparable to the original three approaches being tested.

**Benchmark Preparation Code**

The provided script preparation code creates a container element with 1000 child div elements using a loop. This setup allows for a controlled environment to test the performance of each clearing approach on a large dataset.

I hope this explanation helps you understand the benchmark and its underlying logic!

Related benchmarks:

innerhtml vs removechild vs remove #0000 (No first child) (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: innerHTML vs removeChild vs remove

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

innerHTML

removeChild

remove

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):