Benchmark: document.getElementById vs Date.now()

HTML Preparation code:

<input type="text" id="spd_t" value="1">

Tests:

getElementById
var spd_tm = document.getElementById('spd_t').value;
Date.now()
var spd_tm = Date.now();

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
getElementById
Date.now()

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark definition and test cases to understand what is being tested.

**Benchmark Definition**
The benchmark measures the performance of two approaches: `document.getElementById` vs `Date.now()` for accessing the value of an HTML input element.

**Options Compared**

1. **`document.getElementById`**: This approach uses the `Element` interface in JavaScript, which allows you to retrieve a DOM element by its ID. It returns the referenced element or null if not found.
2. **`Date.now()`**: This approach uses the built-in `Date` object's `now()` method, which returns the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC.

**Pros and Cons**

* **`document.getElementById`**:
	+ Pros: It allows for more precise control over the DOM element being accessed.
	+ Cons: It can be slower due to the overhead of navigating the DOM tree, especially for large documents.
* **`Date.now()`**:
	+ Pros: It is generally faster since it doesn't involve DOM manipulation and returns a simple numeric value.
	+ Cons: It requires additional processing to convert the timestamp into a meaningful format.

**Library Used (if applicable)**

None of the provided test cases use any external libraries.

**Special JS Feature or Syntax**
Neither of the test cases uses any special JavaScript features or syntax.

**Other Alternatives**

If you wanted to compare these approaches, other alternatives could be:

* Using `document.querySelector` instead of `document.getElementById`
* Using a library like Lodash's `get` function for accessing DOM elements
* Comparing with other methods for getting the current timestamp, such as `Performance.now()` or `performance.now()`

However, in this specific benchmark, `Date.now()` is the clear winner due to its simplicity and speed.

**Benchmark Preparation Code**
The preparation code provided creates an HTML input element with a value of 1, which is used by both test cases:

```html
<input type="text" id="spd_t" value="1">
```

This ensures that both approaches are accessing the same input element's value.

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/101.0.4951.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 101 on Linux

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
getElementById	3830671.8 Ops/sec
Date.now()	4444770.5 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

document.getElementById vs Date.now() (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: getElementById vs Date.now()

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

getElementById

Date.now()

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):