Benchmark: JS: insertBefore vs appendChild

HTML Preparation code:

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

Script Preparation code:

var container = document.getElementById("container");
var paragraph = document.createElement("p");

Tests:

append
container.insertBefore(paragraph, null);
appendChild
container.appendChild(paragraph);

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
append
appendChild

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 11 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 137 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
append	3214805.2 Ops/sec
appendChild	3323941.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

I'd be happy to explain the benchmark and its various components.

**Benchmark Overview**

The provided JSON represents a JavaScript microbenchmarking test case on the MeasureThat.net website. The test compares two approaches for inserting an HTML element (`paragraph`) into another element (`container`): `insertBefore()` and `appendChild()` methods.

**Script Preparation Code**

The script preparation code sets up a container element in the DOM:
```javascript
var container = document.getElementById("container");
var paragraph = document.createElement("p");
```
This code creates an empty paragraph element and assigns it to the `paragraph` variable. It also retrieves an existing container element from the DOM, which will serve as the parent element for the new paragraph.

**Html Preparation Code**

The HTML preparation code defines a basic HTML structure:
```html
<div id="container"></div>
```
This code creates a simple container element with an ID of "container".

**Individual Test Cases**

There are two test cases in this benchmark:

1. `append`: This test case uses the `insertBefore()` method to insert the paragraph element before a null context (i.e., at the beginning of the container).
2. `appendChild`: This test case uses the `appendChild()` method to append the paragraph element directly to the container.

**Options Compared**

The two options being compared are:

1. **`insertBefore(paragraph, null)`**: This approach inserts the paragraph element before a null context, effectively moving it to the beginning of the container.
2. **`appendChild(paragraph)`**: This approach appends the paragraph element directly to the container.

**Pros and Cons**

Here's a brief summary of the pros and cons of each approach:

1. `insertBefore(paragraph, null)`:
	* Pros:
		+ Can potentially be faster for certain DOM manipulation scenarios.
	* Cons:
		+ May require more DOM nodes to be created or updated if the paragraph needs to be inserted at a different position.
2. `appendChild(paragraph)`:
	* Pros:
		+ Typically simpler and more efficient for simple append operations.
	* Cons:
		+ May not perform well if the container has many child elements, as it can create additional DOM nodes.

**Library Usage**

In this benchmark, no libraries are explicitly mentioned in the provided code. However, some JavaScript engines may include internal libraries or optimizations that could affect the results of this benchmark.

**Special JS Features/Syntax**

This benchmark does not use any special JavaScript features or syntax.

**Other Alternatives**

If you were to rewrite this benchmark with alternative approaches, here are a few options:

1. **`insertAdjacentHTML()`**: This method can be used instead of `insertBefore()` and `appendChild()`. It's a more modern method that allows for dynamic insertion of HTML content.
2. **`DOM manipulation libraries`**: Some libraries, like jQuery or DOMManipulation.js, provide optimized DOM manipulation functions that might outperform the built-in methods in this benchmark.
3. **`native Web API optimizations`**: Modern browsers often include native optimizations and APIs (e.g., `requestIdleCallback()`) for performance-critical tasks like DOM manipulation.

These alternatives would require significant changes to the benchmark code and may not provide a direct comparison with the original `insertBefore()` and `appendChild()` methods.

Related benchmarks:

JS: insertBefore vs appendChild (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: append vs appendChild

Created: 5 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

append

appendChild

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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