Benchmark: createTextNode, textContent, innerText, innerHTML, nodeValue

Script Preparation code:

var a = document.createElement('a');

Tests:

createTextNode
a.appendChild(document.createTextNode('text'));
textContent
a.textContent = 'text';
innerText
a.innerText = 'text';
innerHTML
a.innerHTML = 'text';
nodeValue
a.nodeValue = 'text';

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
createTextNode
textContent
innerText
innerHTML
nodeValue

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 29 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided JSON data and explain what's being tested, compared, and their pros and cons.

**Benchmark Definition**

The `createTextNode, textContent, innerText, innerHTML, nodeValue` benchmark tests the performance of different methods to set or get the text content of an HTML element. The script preparation code creates a new HTML anchor (`<a>`) element named `a`, which will be used as the test subject.

**Individual Test Cases**

Each test case defines a specific method for setting or getting the text content of the `a` element:

1. `createTextNode`: Creates a new `textNode` object using the `document.createTextNode()` method and appends it to the `a` element.
2. `textContent`: Sets the `textContent` property of the `a` element to a string value (`'text'`).
3. `innerText`: Sets the `innerText` property of the `a` element to a string value (`'text'`).
4. `innerHTML`: Sets the `innerHTML` property of the `a` element to a string value (`'text'`).
5. `nodeValue`: Sets the `nodeValue` property of the `a` element to a string value (`'text'`).

**Comparison**

The benchmark compares the performance of these five methods:

* `createTextNode`
* `textContent`
* `innerText`
* `innerHTML`
* `nodeValue`

**Pros and Cons**

Here's a brief analysis of each method:

1. **createTextNode**: Creates a new text node, which can be less efficient than setting the `textContent` property directly.
	* Pros: Does not modify the existing element's text content.
	* Cons: Requires creating a new text node, which can incur additional overhead.
2. **textContent**: Sets the text content of the element using its own property.
	* Pros: Fast and efficient.
	* Cons: Modifies the existing element's text content, which might be unexpected for some users.
3. **innerText**: Similar to `textContent`, but only applies to elements that support innerText (e.g., some text editors).
	* Pros: Faster than `textContent` for certain use cases.
	* Cons: Not supported by all browsers or elements.
4. **innerHTML**: Sets the HTML content of the element using its own property.
	* Pros: Can set not only text content but also other HTML elements and attributes.
	* Cons: Can be slower due to the overhead of parsing and sanitizing HTML code.

5. **nodeValue**: Sets the `nodeValue` property of the element, which is similar to `textContent`.
	* Pros: Fast and efficient for setting node values in certain contexts (e.g., XML documents).
	* Cons: Not directly applicable to HTML elements, as they use `textContent`.

**Library Usage**

There are no explicit libraries used in this benchmark. However, it's worth noting that some of these methods rely on the browser's internal implementation or standards (e.g., `textContent` and `innerText`). Other libraries might provide additional features or optimizations for specific scenarios.

**Special JS Features or Syntax**

None of the test cases explicitly use special JavaScript features or syntax. They focus solely on the DOM manipulation APIs provided by modern browsers.

**Alternatives**

If you need to compare performance in other contexts, consider the following alternatives:

* Measure the execution time of a custom implementation using your preferred programming language.
* Use existing benchmarking frameworks like Benchmark.js or Benchmark.ch to create and run more complex benchmarks.
* Compare different libraries or frameworks for tasks like DOM manipulation, parsing, or serialization.

Keep in mind that this specific benchmark is designed to compare the performance of simple DOM manipulation APIs, which might not be representative of real-world use cases.

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 119 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
createTextNode	3966306.2 Ops/sec
textContent	19034154.0 Ops/sec
innerText	5859000.0 Ops/sec
innerHTML	2535886.2 Ops/sec
nodeValue	25098704.0 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

createTextNode, textContent, innerText, innerHTML, nodeValue (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: createTextNode vs textContent vs innerText vs innerHTML vs nodeValue

Created: 4 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

createTextNode

textContent

innerText

innerHTML

nodeValue

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 29 days ago):