Benchmark: Date.now vs setTimeout

Tests:

Date.now
const timestamp = Date.now()
setTimeout
const handle = setTimeout(() => { this.shouldRestart = true; }, 1000 * 60 * 5);

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 8 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 8 runs

Date.now

10.4M/s

setTimeout

684K/s

Fastest: Date.now (15.2x faster)

View exact numbers

✓ Date.now: 10,379,410 ops/sec
• setTimeout: 683,686 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
Date.now
setTimeout

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/136.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 136 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Date.now

21.5M/s

setTimeout

705K/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ Date.now	21,474,252 Ops/sec
setTimeout	704,602 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark and explain what is being tested, compared, and their pros and cons.

**What is being tested?**

Two different approaches are being compared: `Date.now()` and `setTimeout()`. The test aims to measure which one is faster in terms of executing a block of code within a specified time frame (5 minutes).

**Options compared**

* **`Date.now()`**: This function returns the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch (January 1, 1970). It's a simple and straightforward way to get the current timestamp.
* **`setTimeout()`**: This function schedules a callback function to be executed after a specified delay in milliseconds. In this test, it's used to schedule a block of code to run after a 5-minute delay.

**Pros and Cons**

* **`Date.now()`**:
	+ Pros: Simple, fast, and widely supported.
	+ Cons: May not provide the most accurate timestamp due to potential clock drift or system overhead.
* **`setTimeout()`**:
	+ Pros: Allows for more complex scheduling and callbacks, making it a popular choice for asynchronous programming.
	+ Cons: Introduces additional overhead due to the need to schedule and manage timers.

**Other considerations**

* The `Date.now()` function is likely to be faster because it doesn't require setting up a timer or waiting for an event to occur. It simply returns the current timestamp.
* The `setTimeout()` approach, on the other hand, requires setting up a timer, which may introduce additional overhead due to the need to manage timers and schedules.

**Library**

None of the test cases explicitly use any libraries. However, it's worth noting that `Date.now()` is a built-in function in JavaScript, while `setTimeout()` relies on the browser's or Node.js's implementation of the timer API.

**Special JS feature or syntax**

There are no special features or syntax used in these test cases. The code uses standard JavaScript syntax and doesn't employ any advanced features like async/await, promises, or decorators.

**Alternative approaches**

If you wanted to compare other approaches, some alternatives could be:

* Using `performance.now()` instead of `Date.now()`: This function returns the number of milliseconds since performance measurement began.
* Using `setInterval()` instead of `setTimeout()`: This function calls a block of code at regular intervals.

Keep in mind that these alternatives may have different overheads or characteristics, and the results might be affected accordingly.

Date.now vs setTimeout (version: 0) Benchmark.js

Comparing performance of: `Date.now vs setTimeout`

Created: 5 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

Date.now

setTimeout

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 8 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 8 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

Date.now vs setTimeout (version: 0) Benchmark.js

Comparing performance of: Date.now vs setTimeout

Created: 5 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

Date.now

setTimeout

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 8 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 8 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

Related benchmarks

Comparing performance of: `Date.now vs setTimeout`