Benchmark: createElement vs innerHTML (3000)

HTML Preparation code:

<div class='x'></div>

Tests:

createElement
let fragment = new DocumentFragment(); for (let i = 0; i < 3000; i++) { fragment.appendChild(document.createElement("div")); } document.querySelector(".x").append(fragment);
innerHTML
let fragment = ""; for (let i = 0; i < 3000; i++) { fragment += "<div></div>"; } document.querySelector(".x").innerHTML = fragment;

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
createElement
innerHTML

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/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 134 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
createElement	1076.2 Ops/sec
innerHTML	1770.5 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 what's being tested in the provided benchmark.

The benchmark compares two approaches for generating HTML content: `innerHTML` and `createElement`. Both methods are used to create and append elements to the DOM (Document Object Model).

**Options compared:**

1. **innerHTML**: This method involves concatenating a string of HTML elements using the `+` operator or template literals, and then setting the innerHTML of an element to this concatenated string.
2. **createElement**: This method involves creating individual elements using the `document.createElement()` function, appending these elements to a DocumentFragment, and then appending the fragment to the DOM.

**Pros and Cons:**

* **innerHTML**:
	+ Pros: Easy to read and write, doesn't require explicit DOM manipulation.
	+ Cons: Can lead to performance issues if used excessively due to string concatenation and DOM mutations. Also, some modern browsers have limitations on using `innerHTML` for security reasons (e.g., preventing XSS attacks).
* **createElement**:
	+ Pros: More efficient for large amounts of HTML content, as it avoids the overhead of string manipulation and DOM mutations.
	+ Cons: Requires explicit DOM management, which can be error-prone and less readable.

**Library usage:**

The benchmark uses a `DocumentFragment` object, which is part of the HTML5 specification. A DocumentFragment is a way to group elements in the DOM without actually adding them to the document tree. It's used here to reduce the number of DOM mutations by appending multiple elements at once.

**Special JS feature or syntax:**

None mentioned in this specific benchmark.

**Other alternatives:**

* **String replacement**: Instead of concatenating strings, you could use a library like String.prototype.replace() to replace placeholders with HTML elements.
* **DOM manipulation libraries**: Libraries like jQuery or React can simplify DOM manipulation and might offer better performance for large-scale applications.

To prepare for this benchmark, software engineers should be familiar with the basic concepts of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as common techniques for working with the DOM. They should also be aware of potential performance implications when using `innerHTML` versus creating elements programmatically.

Related benchmarks:

createElement vs innerHTML (3000) (version: 0)

createElement vs innerHTML (3000)

Comparing performance of: createElement vs innerHTML

Created: 4 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

createElement

innerHTML

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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