Best of jsperf (2000-2013) – Part 1/3

After surfing through hundreds of jsperf tests, today I bring to you jsperf – best of (2000-2013). For those who don’t know, jsperf.com is an online tool that provides us with JavaScript performance testing. Very useful for Improving your JavaScript & jQuery code performance / comparing the speed of different algorithms and code snippets! This post gives a super fast overview of the results of some of the best ones I’ve seen (so far).

There are quite a few tests so I’ve split them into the following Speed Test groups:

• Part 1 – jQuery Selectors, JavaScript Strings, JavaScript DOM Caching/DOM Traversal
• Part 2 – jQuery Each/Loops, jQuery AJAX, jQuery Animation/CSS, JavaScript Templating
• Part 3 – Miscellaneous Speed Tests (the best of the rest!)

As always leave comments and if I’ve missed any you think are important please share. Let’s improve our coding and speed up the web!

jQuery Selector Speed Tests

These tests compare the performance of the different jQuery selectors.

id vs class vs tag vs pseudo vs. attribute selectors

Quick look at the speed of different jQuery selectors.

JavaScript String Speed Tests

Concatenating Literals

Comparing the speed of concatenating literals vs one long string assignment

String concatenation vs Regex

jQuery .size() vs .length.

Testing how much slower the jQuery method size() is against checking the length directly.

JavaScript DOM Caching/Traversal

DOM Caching vs No DOM Cache

Test the performance of DOM caching in a basic JavaScript namespacing pattern.

Caching DOM references outside of a loop

DOM caching excercise and node types

jQuery filter vs find.

Also see JQUERY FILTER FUNCTION EXAMPLE.