Benchmark: json stringify vs array tostring

Script Preparation code:

function moreData(arr, left) {
  if(left === 0) return arr;
  else {
    arr.push(Math.floor(Math.random() * 256));
  	return moreData(arr, left - 1);
  }
}
function makeTestData() { return moreData([], 4); }

Tests:

toString
makeTestData().toString()
JSON.stringify
JSON.stringify(makeTestData());

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 26 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 20 runs

toString

1.2M/s

JSON.stringify

1.1M/s

View exact numbers

✓ toString: 1,179,894 ops/sec
• JSON.stringify: 1,111,160 ops/sec

Firefox 6 runs

toString

5.1M/s

JSON.stringify

2.6M/s

Fastest: toString (2.0x faster)

View exact numbers

✓ toString: 5,067,198 ops/sec
• JSON.stringify: 2,566,501 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
toString
JSON.stringify

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 7 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.127 Safari/537.36 OPR/60.3.3004.55692

Browser/OS: Opera 60 on Linux

View result in a separate tab

toString

247K/s

JSON.stringify

198K/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ toString	246,821 Ops/sec
JSON.stringify	197,729 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 definition and test cases to understand what is being tested.

**Benchmark Definition**

The benchmark consists of two test cases: `toString` and `JSON.stringify`. Both tests are designed to measure the performance of JavaScript's stringification methods, which convert objects into strings.

**Script Preparation Code**

The script preparation code is a recursive function called `moreData` that generates an array of random numbers. This function is used as input for both test cases.

```javascript
function moreData(arr, left) {
  if(left === 0) return arr;
  else {
    arr.push(Math.floor(Math.random() * 256));
    return moreData(arr, left - 1);
  }
}

function makeTestData() { return moreData([], 4); }
```

The `makeTestData` function creates an array with a length of 4 and returns it.

**Html Preparation Code**

There is no HTML preparation code provided, which means that the benchmark does not account for any DOM-related overhead or latency associated with rendering HTML content.

**Test Cases**

**1. `toString`**

This test case measures the performance of JavaScript's built-in stringification method using the `toString()` method on an object reference.

```javascript
makeTestData().toString()
```

**2. `JSON.stringify`**

This test case measures the performance of JSON's stringification method, which converts objects into a formatted string representation.

```javascript
JSON.stringify(makeTestData())
```

**Pros and Cons**

Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages:

*   **`toString()`**: This method is lightweight and fast because it simply returns the memory address of the object reference. However, it can lead to unexpected behavior if the object reference changes or is nullified.
*   **`JSON.stringify()`**: This method is more robust because it serializes the entire object graph, including nested objects and arrays, into a human-readable format. However, it can be slower due to the added overhead of formatting and escaping special characters.

**Library and Special Features**

There is no explicit library mentioned in the benchmark definition. However, JSON.stringify() uses a built-in JavaScript library (ECMAScript) to serialize objects.

If you're interested in exploring alternative stringification methods, consider:

*   **Babel's `JSON` module**: Provides a lightweight way to parse and generate JSON data.
*   **Node.js' `json5` module**: Offers a faster parsing speed than the standard JSON parser for Node.js.

json stringify vs array tostring (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: `toString vs JSON.stringify`

Created: 7 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

toString

JSON.stringify

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 26 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 20 runs

Firefox 6 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

json stringify vs array tostring (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: toString vs JSON.stringify

Created: 7 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

toString

JSON.stringify

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 26 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 20 runs

Firefox 6 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: `toString vs JSON.stringify`