37 JavaScript benchmarks

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, February 13, 2008 @ 12:08 pm

JavaScript benchmarks have achieved greater visibility in the Ajax era, but they have a long and proud history. I did a little digging and came up with this round-up of profiling suites past, present and future. Many of them mix pure JS tests with DOM tests. Those that focus more on a specific type of operation are broken out into a separate list after the jump, as are browser-specific benchmarks and a bunch of cobweb-covered older suites.

Recent Benchmarks

• SunSpider 0.9: The Webkit team's JavaScript benchmark. (Announcement here.) (Jeff Atwood's post here.)
• Javascript Library Performance Test Roundup: From the folks behind PBWiki. (Results page here.)
• Ajax and Flex Data Loading Benchmarks: From James Ward, RIA Cowboy using his own Census tool.
• JavaScript Engine Speeds: John Resig of jQuery's September 2007 post comparing Rhino to SpiderMonkey, Tamarin and JavaScriptCore.
• A Study of Ajax Performance Issues: Coach Wei uses the jsLex profiling tool to put the entire Ajax stack through its paces.
• Evaluate Low Level JavaScript Performance Characteristics: Speaking of jsLex, it was created by the folks from RockStarApps, who pitted it against September 2007's best and brightest browsers in this post.
• JavaScript Speed Tests: From Celtic Kane Online.
• General Browser Load-Time Test: The first in an entire suite of browser tests from the Non-Troppo site.
• Double-Dollar Speed Test: An interactive suite that tests the selector functions of various big Ajax libraries.
• Computer Language Benchmarks Game: A clever, snarky "game" in which various language implementations can be tested against one another.
• i-Bench: The now-discontinued benchmark suite used by PC Magazine can still be downloaded in its archival edition.

Issue-specific benchmarks

• JavaScript date formatting benchmarks: An interesting and novel blog post from 2006.
• JavaScript optimization, are chained calls expensive?: More historically interesting material from 2006.
• JavaScript for and while loop benchmark: A nice niche test suite from the Web Reflection blog.
• Adding DOM elements to document: A benchmark from the Wildbit folks.
• Scoot Benchmarks: A test suite of indeterminate provenance.
• Mesh transform: A math-heavy pure JS test from the Webkit site, which also maintains its own benchmark links page.
• JavaScript performance test: Another set of math-heavy tests.
• Bits In Byte Function Compare: More math-heavy tests.
• JavaScript loops performance test: A suite written for this blog post by developer Batiste Bieler.
• DOM Core Performance: Appending, Prepending, Inserting, Indexing, Removing: A suite whose title says it all.
• JavaScript loop test: Another search for the most efficient loop structure.

Older benchmarks

• VisiBone JavaScript Research by Unit Tests: A thorough set of tests dating from the Firefox 1.0 era.
• Ron's Small JavaScript Benchmarks: Some truly dusty JS Benchmark tests from 1996, of mostly historical interest. (Alternate link here.)
• JavaScript Speed Trials: A four-part blog entry from 2005 that attempts to extrapolate information about JavaScript best practices from IE6's performance. A bit out of date, but still an interesting read.
• JS/Bench 1.1: Some older test suites from ComputerBytesMan.com.
• JavaScript speed test: An older set of tests from Jason Orendorff, lately of the Mozilla Corporation and an engineer on the Firefox JavaScript engine.
• Benchmark - W3C DOM vs. innerHTML: PPK from QuirksMode's older but useful DHTML benchmark. QuirksMode also maintains a page listing additional historical benchmarks, some of which are now defunct.
• DHTML JavaScript Benchmark (DOM and innerHTML): Another set of DOM/innerHTML tests.
• Beware of JavaScript Library Overkill: A Particletree benchmark that cast aspersions of Prototype's Enumerable class circa 2006.
• JavaScript Benchmarks: All sorts of JSON and JS benchmarking posts from Dave Johnson's blog.

Browser-specific benchmarks

• Wired News Benchmarks Show Safari 3 Is Slower Than IE 7, Firefox
• Performance Tests for Opera 9.5
• Firefox 3 beta 2 JavaScript benchmark plus why Flock is faster than Firefox 2: A rather controversial blog post about testing the SunSpider benchmark on Flock vs. Firefox.
• iPhone JavaScript and Spec Benchmark: John Murch puts his iPhone through the paces using a number of the other benchmarks listed here.
• Benchmarking in your pants: More iPhone benchmarks.

Given last year's flap between Apple and Opera over Safari's benchmark claims and all the work Mozilla is putting into optimizing Firefox 3, it seems certain that performance will remain an important battle line amongst the big browser vendors. Despite the plethora of test suites above, I'm sure there are more to come.

agile ajax

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