Run results for: Create and append/remove versus display:block/display:none (improved)

By writing javascript web applications It is often common the need to show or hide elements like a div according to the user actions. Is it better to do this by creating and appending the node when it is needed or to create the node on the application start and then just display or hide it? This benchmark is a performance test of this particular use case. In this version, the createAppendDiv was isolated from operations that can be done once, so the test executes just the operations that are really essencial for the test case.

Go to the benchmark

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.67 Safari/537.36

Browser: Chrome 101

Operating system: Windows 7

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 2 years ago

Test name	Executions per second
Create and append/remove	1.2 Ops/sec
display:block/display:none	2.4 Ops/sec

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="container">
  <div id="div1">div1</div>
  <div id="div2">div2</div>
  <div id="div4">div4</div>
</div>

Script Preparation code:

function createHideCssClass() {
  var style = document.createElement('style');
  style.type = 'text/css';
  style.innerHTML = '.hide { display: none; }';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);
}

var container = document.getElementById('container');
var div4 = document.getElementById('div4');

function createAppendDiv() {
  var div3 = document.createElement('div');
  div3.setAttribute('id', 'div3');
  var content = document.createTextNode('div3');
  div3.appendChild(content);
  container.insertBefore(div3, div4);
}

function removeDiv() {
  var div3 = document.getElementById('div3');
  div3.remove();
}

function hideDiv() {
  var div2 = document.getElementById('div2');
  div2.classList.add('hide');
}

function showDiv() {
  var div2 = document.getElementById('div2');
  div2.classList.remove('hide');
}

createHideCssClass();
var times = 100000;

Tests:

Create and append/remove
for (var i=0; i< times; i++) { createAppendDiv(); removeDiv(); }
display:block/display:none
for (var i=0; i< times; i++) { hideDiv(); showDiv(); }