Skip to main content

Why is this Javascript much *slower* than its jQuery equivalent?



I have a HTML list of about 500 items and a "filter" box above it. I started by using jQuery to filter the list when I typed a letter (timing code added later):







$('#filter').keyup( function() {

var jqStart = (new Date).getTime();



var search = $(this).val().toLowerCase();

var $list = $('ul.ablist > li');



$list.each( function() {

if ( $(this).text().toLowerCase().indexOf(search) === -1 )

$(this).hide();

else

$(this).show();

} );



console.log('Time: ' + ((new Date).getTime() - jqStart));

} );







However, there was a couple of seconds delay after typing each letter (particularly the first letter). So I thought it may be slightly quicker if I used plain Javascript (I read recently that jQuery's each function is particularly slow). Here's my JS equivalent:







document.getElementById('filter').addEventListener( 'keyup', function () {

var jsStart = (new Date).getTime();



var search = this.value.toLowerCase();

var list = document.querySelectorAll('ul.ablist > li');

for ( var i = 0; i < list.length; i++ )

{

if ( list[i].innerText.toLowerCase().indexOf(search) === -1 )

list[i].style.display = 'none';

else

list[i].style.display = 'block';

}



console.log('Time: ' + ((new Date).getTime() - jsStart));

}, false );







To my surprise however, the plain Javascript is up to 10 times slower than the jQuery equivalent. The jQuery version takes around 2-3 seconds to filter on each letter, while the Javascript version takes 17+ seconds! I'm using Google Chrome on Ubuntu Linux.





This isn't for anything really important so it doesn't need to be super efficient. But am I doing something really dumb with my Javascript here?



Source: Tips4all

Comments

  1. You could try using textContent instead of innerText , I think it should be faster. Also timing the list-generation and loop separately would tell if there is problem in list-generation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Another best practice for javascript speed is caching the list.length in a variable and calling the variable like:

    l = list.length;
    for (var i=0;i<l;i++):{ code here}


    And maybe timing with jsperf would be better.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I used while instead of for and did some minor improvements. Here is the final code.

    var list = list = document.querySelectorAll('ul.ablist > li');
    document.getElementById('javascriptFilter').addEventListener( 'keyup', function () {
    var jsStart = (new Date).getTime(),
    search = this.value.toLowerCase(),
    i = list.length - 1,
    listItem,
    result;
    while( i >= 0 )
    {
    listItem = list[i];
    if ( listItem.textContent.toLowerCase().indexOf(search) === -1 )
    listItem.style.display = 'none';
    else
    listItem.style.display = 'block';
    i--;
    }

    result = ((new Date).getTime() - jsStart);
    console.log(['Time: ', result, '<br />'].join(''));
    }, false );

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Android emulator

I have a 2.67 GHz Celeron processor, 1.21 GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine. My understanding is that the Android emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine, but for me it does not. I have followed all instructions in setting up the IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in staring the emulator quickly but is very particulary. How can I, if possible, fix this problem?