Benchmarking JavaScript snippets

A few days back I was playing around with lodash to figure out if some of its functions would add significant overhead as opposed to their vanilla counterparts: in doing so I discovered matcha, an amazing tool for benchmarking JS code.

Matcha comes with a clear goal in mind: “no waste of time, show me the code”, as it’s incredibly easy to setup and start benchmarking.

We first need to create a benchmark file (say index.js) and start adding test suites; a suite simply describes the functionality we want to benchmark, such as creating a new object, handpicking properties, from a “larger” one:

1
2
3
4
5

let _ = require('lodash')

suite('picking properties from an object', function () {
  // ...
});

At this point, we can create a custom object that’s going to be used by the implementations we want to benchmark:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

let _ = require('lodash')

suite('picking properties from an object', function () {
  let obj = {
    name: 'alex',
    age: 28,
    hair: 'enough',
    status: 'married',
    job: 'who really knows',
  }
});

and, still inside the suite, start adding our implementations:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22

let _ = require('lodash')

suite('picking properties from an object', function () {
  let obj = {
    name: 'alex',
    age: 28,
    hair: 'enough',
    status: 'married',
    job: 'who really knows',
  }

  bench('lodash _.pick', function() {
    return _.pick(obj, ['name', 'age'])
  });

  bench('vanilla', function() {
    return {
      name: obj.name,
      age: obj.age,
    }
  });
});

Assuming matcha is installed globally (npm install -g matcha) you can then simply:

1
2
3
4
5

$ matcha index.js

                      picking properties from an object
         651,233 op/s » lodash _.pick
      80,885,471 op/s » vanilla

As you see, matcha starts executing those functions repeatedly, for a few seconds, and outputs how many executions it was able to do within that timeframe.

The matcha bin will autorun tests as soon as you place under a ./benchmarks folder, and you can customize the number of iterations to run the snippets for:

1
2
3
4
5

suite('picking properties from an object', function () {
  set('iterations', 10000);

  // ...
})

Support for async benchmarks is provided with a next callback that you’ll need to call once the async operation is over:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

bench('some async thingy with promises', function(next) {
  somePromise(someParams).then(next)
});

bench('some async thingy with goold old callbacks', function(next) {
  someFn(someParams, next)
});

Can it get any easier?