Benchmark: createElement vs cloneNode333

Tests:

createElement
var list = []; let n = 0; while (++n != 100_000) { list.push(document.createElement("div")); }
cloneNode
var list = []; let n = 0; const node = document.createElement("img"); node.style.width = "24px"; while (++n != 100_000) { list.push(node.cloneNode()); }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
createElement
cloneNode

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/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 126 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
createElement	19.8 Ops/sec
cloneNode	14.3 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

I'll break down the benchmark test and its options for you.

**Benchmark Test Overview**

The test compares two approaches to create new DOM elements:

1. `createElement`: Creating a new DOM element using the `document.createElement()` method.
2. `cloneNode`: Cloning an existing DOM element using the `cloneNode()` method, rather than creating a new one.

**What is tested?**

In this test, we're interested in determining which approach is faster for creating a large number of new DOM elements (100,000 in this case) before insertion into the document. The benchmark aims to measure the performance difference between these two approaches.

**Options Compared**

There are only two options being compared:

1. `createElement`: Creates a new DOM element from scratch.
2. `cloneNode`: Clones an existing DOM element to create a new one.

**Pros and Cons of each approach:**

* **createElement**:
	+ Pros:
		- Faster, as it doesn't require cloning an existing element.
		- More flexible, as you can set properties directly on the newly created element.
	+ Cons:
		- Requires more memory, as a new DOM element is created from scratch.
		- May lead to slower performance if not optimized properly.
* **cloneNode**:
	+ Pros:
		- Faster for large numbers of elements, as cloning is generally faster than creating from scratch.
		- More memory-efficient, as only the cloned element's contents are copied, not the entire element.
	+ Cons:
		- Requires an existing DOM element to clone, which may not be available in all situations.
		- Less flexible, as you're working with a copy of the original element.

**Library: None**

There is no library being used in this benchmark test. The `document` object and standard JavaScript methods (`createElement`, `cloneNode`) are being used to compare the performance of these two approaches.

**Special JS feature or syntax: None**

This benchmark doesn't rely on any special JavaScript features or syntax, so it's accessible to developers with varying levels of knowledge.

**Other alternatives**

If you were to add more options to this benchmark, some alternative approaches could be:

* Using a library like jQuery or a DOM manipulation framework (e.g., React) that provides optimized methods for creating and managing DOM elements.
* Using Web Workers or other parallel processing techniques to create new elements in the background while still executing on the main thread.
* Comparing the performance of different rendering engines or browser versions using a benchmarking framework like WebGL or Metal.

These alternatives would allow you to explore additional aspects of performance optimization, but they're not part of this specific benchmark test.

Related benchmarks:

createElement vs cloneNode333 (version: 0)

Faster way to create new dom elements before insertion

Comparing performance of: createElement vs cloneNode

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

createElement

cloneNode

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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