Benchmark: sset vs remove atttr

HTML Preparation code:

<span id='text'>Text</span>

Script Preparation code:

var el = document.getElementById('text');

Tests:

set/set
var testElement = document.getElementById("text"); testElement.setAttribute("title", "test"); testElement.setAttribute("title", "");
set/delete
var testElement = document.getElementById("text"); testElement.setAttribute("title", "test"); testElement.removeAttribute("title");

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
set/set
set/delete

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 114 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
set/set	1663232.4 Ops/sec
set/delete	1660847.2 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Measuring JavaScript performance is crucial for optimizing code and ensuring efficient execution across different browsers and devices. The test you provided, "sset vs remove attr," measures the performance difference between setting and removing attributes from an HTML element.

**Benchmark Definition JSON**

The benchmark definition provides two scripts that demonstrate the difference in performance between setting and deleting attributes:

1. `var el = document.getElementById('text');` - This line retrieves an HTML element with the id "text".
2. The script then sets a new attribute on the element, `testElement.setAttribute("title", "test");`.
3. Next, it tries to set another value for the same attribute, `testElement.setAttribute("title", "");`. This is where the benchmark splits: either it sets the same attribute again (in the `set/delete` test case) or removes the existing attribute and does nothing else.

The difference in performance arises because setting an attribute that already exists involves updating its value, while removing an attribute simply resets its value to null. In most JavaScript engines, setting a new value on an existing attribute is faster than removing an attribute, as it's essentially just assigning a new property to the object.

**Options Compared**

Two options are compared:

1. **Set Attribute**: Setting an attribute that already exists involves updating its value.
	* Pros: In some cases, setting an attribute might be more efficient if you're frequently changing its value.
	* Cons: It can be slower than removing an existing attribute when the attribute is only being set to null or cleared.
2. **Remove Attribute**: Removing an attribute sets its value to null.

**Other Considerations**

In general, removing an attribute and setting it again (to a different value) is faster because:

*   Updating an existing attribute involves checking if the attribute already exists in the object, which can be slow for large objects.
*   Setting a new value on an existing attribute involves updating its property descriptor, which may incur additional overhead due to the complexity of property descriptors.

However, setting an attribute that doesn't exist might be faster because it's simply creating a new property on the object without any overhead from checking if the attribute already exists.

**Library Usage**

There is no library explicitly mentioned in this benchmark. However, some JavaScript engines like V8 (used by Google Chrome) have features that can improve performance for attribute operations:

*   **Property descriptors**: Modern JavaScript engines can take advantage of property descriptors to speed up attribute setting and removal.
*   **Optimized V8**: Some versions of the V8 engine optimize attribute updates and removals using specialized code paths.

**Special JS Features or Syntax**

There are no special JavaScript features or syntax explicitly mentioned in this benchmark. However, some modern browsers may use additional techniques like:

*   **Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation**: Browsers like SpiderMonkey (used by Firefox) and V8 (used by Google Chrome) have JIT compilers that optimize certain operations, including attribute updates.
*   **Profile-guided optimization**: Modern JavaScript engines often use profiling data to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize those areas.

**Alternatives**

Some alternative ways to measure this benchmark might involve:

1.  **Using a different attribute**, like `data-` attributes or CSS properties, which may have different performance characteristics.
2.  **Measuring the time it takes to update multiple attributes** versus removing an existing one and then setting another value.
3.  **Comparing these operations with other JavaScript tasks**, such as parsing expressions, executing closures, or manipulating large arrays.

These variations can help to better understand the specific performance characteristics of different attribute operations in modern JavaScript engines.

Related benchmarks:

sset vs remove atttr (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: set/set vs set/delete

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

set/set

set/delete

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):