Benchmark: TreeWalker vs querySelectorAll vs NodeIterator + filter HTMLElement

HTML Preparation code:

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</article>
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  <h1>Lorem ipsum</h1>
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</article>
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Tests:

TreeWalker
const treeWalker = document.createTreeWalker( document.body, NodeFilter.SHOW_ELEMENT, ); const list = []; let element; while (element = treeWalker.nextNode()) { list.push(element); } const elements = list.filter(el => el instanceof HTMLElement);
querySelectorAll
const elements = Array.from(document.body.querySelectorAll('*')).filter(node => node instanceof HTMLElement);
NodeIterator
const nodeIterator = document.createNodeIterator( document.body, NodeFilter.SHOW_ELEMENT, ); const list = []; let element; while (element = nodeIterator.nextNode()) { list.push(element); } const elements = list.filter(el => el instanceof HTMLElement);

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 13 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 13 runs

TreeWalker

373K/s

NodeIterator

320K/s

querySelectorAll

217K/s

Fastest: TreeWalker (1.7x faster)

View exact numbers

✓ TreeWalker: 372,647 ops/sec
• NodeIterator: 319,612 ops/sec
• querySelectorAll: 216,751 ops/sec

Results show median performance across all community submissions. Run this benchmark yourself to verify on your device.

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
TreeWalker
querySelectorAll
NodeIterator

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 9 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/142.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 142 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

TreeWalker

1.4M/s

NodeIterator

1.0M/s

querySelectorAll

632K/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ TreeWalker	1,421,613 Ops/sec
NodeIterator	1,008,794 Ops/sec
querySelectorAll	632,164 Ops/sec

TreeWalker vs querySelectorAll vs NodeIterator + filter HTMLElement (version: 7)

Comparing performance of: `TreeWalker vs querySelectorAll vs NodeIterator`

Created: 5 years ago by: Registered User

Go to the latest result

TreeWalker

querySelectorAll

NodeIterator

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 13 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 13 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

TreeWalker vs querySelectorAll vs NodeIterator + filter HTMLElement (version: 7)

Comparing performance of: TreeWalker vs querySelectorAll vs NodeIterator

Created: 5 years ago by: Registered User

Go to the latest result

TreeWalker

querySelectorAll

NodeIterator

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 13 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 13 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Related benchmarks

Comparing performance of: `TreeWalker vs querySelectorAll vs NodeIterator`