Benchmark: innerhtml vs removeChild-firstChild vs removeChild-lastChild

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="container"></div>

Script Preparation code:

var node = document.getElementById('container');

for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) node.appendChild(document.createElement('div'));

Tests:

innerHTML
var node = document.getElementById('container'); node.innerHTML = '';
removeChild-firstChild
var node = document.getElementById('container'); while(node.firstChild) node.removeChild(node.firstChild)
removeChild-lastChild
var node = document.getElementById('container'); while(node.lastChild) node.removeChild(node.lastChild)

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
innerHTML
removeChild-firstChild
removeChild-lastChild

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0

Browser/OS: Chrome 134 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
innerHTML	7960907.0 Ops/sec
removeChild-firstChild	14339680.0 Ops/sec
removeChild-lastChild	13707729.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 6 months ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the benchmark and explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Definition**

The benchmark is defined by three individual test cases:

1. `innerHTML`: Sets the inner HTML of an element to an empty string.
2. `removeChild-firstChild`: Removes the first child node from a list of children using `while` loop.
3. `removeChild-lastChild`: Removes the last child node from a list of children using `while` loop.

**Options Compared**

The benchmark is comparing three different approaches:

1. **innerHTML**: Sets the inner HTML of an element to an empty string.
2. **removeChild-firstChild**: Removes the first child node from a list of children using a `while` loop.
3. **removeChild-lastChild**: Removes the last child node from a list of children using a `while` loop.

**Pros and Cons**

Here's a brief summary of each approach:

1. **innerHTML**:
	* Pros: Simple, easy to implement, and fast (since it only involves setting a string value).
	* Cons: May not be the most efficient way to clear an element's content, especially if you need to remove multiple nodes.
2. **removeChild-firstChild**:
	* Pros: Efficient way to clear an element's content by removing one node at a time.
	* Cons: Requires iterating over the child nodes using a `while` loop, which can be slower than setting `innerHTML`.
3. **removeChild-lastChild**:
	* Pros: Similar to `removeChild-firstChild`, but removes the last node instead of the first.
	* Cons: Also requires iterating over the child nodes, making it less efficient than `innerHTML`.

**Libraries and Special JS Features**

There are no libraries used in this benchmark. However, the use of `while` loops suggests that JavaScript engines may optimize these loops differently.

**Other Considerations**

The benchmark is likely trying to determine which approach is fastest for clearing an element's content. The results suggest that `removeChild-firstChild` and `removeChild-lastChild` are relatively similar in terms of performance, while `innerHTML` is significantly faster.

**Alternatives**

If you're looking for alternative approaches to clear an element's content, you could consider:

* Using a library like jQuery, which provides a `$().empty()` method that clears an element's content.
* Using the `replaceChildren` method on the DOM Element API, which replaces all child nodes of an element with new ones.
* Using a CSS approach, such as setting `display: none` or `visibility: hidden` on the element.

Related benchmarks:

innerhtml vs removeChild-firstChild vs removeChild-lastChild (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: innerHTML vs removeChild-firstChild vs removeChild-lastChild

Created: 4 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

innerHTML

removeChild-firstChild

removeChild-lastChild

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 6 months ago):