Benchmark: Multiply vs divide

Tests:

Multiply
for (let i = 1; i <= 100; i++) { const x = i * 0.1; }
Divide
for (let i = 1; i <= 100; i++) { const x = i / 10; }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Multiply
Divide

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 6 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 OPR/122.0.0.0

Browser/OS: Opera 122 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Multiply	27624452.0 Ops/sec
Divide	27013034.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 11 months ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

### Benchmark Overview

The benchmark named "Multiply vs divide" compares the performance of two arithmetic operations—multiplication and division—using a loop that iterates from 1 to 100.

### Test Cases

1. **Multiply**
   - **Benchmark Definition**: `for (let i = 1; i <= 100; i++) { const x = i * 0.1; }`
   - **Description**: This test case performs multiplication by iterating from 1 to 100 and multiplying each value by 0.1.

2. **Divide**
   - **Benchmark Definition**: `for (let i = 1; i <= 100; i++) { const x = i / 10; }`
   - **Description**: This test case performs division by iterating from 1 to 100 and dividing each value by 10.

### Performance Results

From the latest benchmark results:
- The **Divide** operation achieves **25,562,548 executions per second**.
- The **Multiply** operation achieves **25,346,734 executions per second**.

### Comparison of Operations

#### Pros and Cons

1. **Multiplication**
   - **Pros**:
     - Simple arithmetic and often faster than division due to the way CPUs are optimized for multiplication.
   - **Cons**:
     - Slightly less performant than division in this specific case based on the benchmark results, although performance can be context-dependent.

2. **Division**
   - **Pros**:
     - In some situations, division might be inherently faster, especially with modern CPUs that use optimized pathways for such arithmetic operations.
   - **Cons**:
     - Generally viewed as slower than multiplication in various computational scenarios, though that is not the case here as it outperforms multiplication in this benchmark.

### Considerations

- **Precision**: Both operations in JavaScript (and most programming languages) handle floating-point arithmetic, which can introduce precision issues. The multiplication and division by constants (0.1 and 10) presents minimal risk here, but precision could become an important factor in other situations.
  
- **Context**: The results can vary based on the JavaScript engine (in this case, Firefox) and the system architecture. Different environments might yield different performance characteristics due to optimizations or hardware acceleration.

### Alternatives

1. **Using Other Mathematical Libraries**: Libraries such as `math.js` can provide more advanced mathematical functions and optimizations. However, they may add overhead for simple operations.
2. **WebAssembly (Wasm)**: If high performance for arithmetic operations is crucial, implementations in WebAssembly could potentially speed up execution since it can be compiled closer to machine code, leading to more efficient execution.
3. **Native Code**: Where performance is critical, using languages compiled to native code or leveraging components written in C/C++ through JavaScript bindings may offer performance benefits for computational-heavy workloads.

This benchmark serves as a useful comparison between basic arithmetic operations in JavaScript and can guide developers on choosing appropriate arithmetic operations tailored to their performance requirements.

Related benchmarks:

Multiply vs divide (version: 1)

Comparing performance of: Multiply vs Divide

Created: 11 months ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Multiply

Divide

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 11 months ago):