Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
SlickSpeed CSS Selector TestSuite
Category: CSS, JavaScript
, Library
, MooTools
SlickSpeed is a CSS selector test suite provided by the MooTools folk.
This tool comes at the same time as they release CSS3 support in Mootools, and it compares Prototype, jQuery, MooTools, Ext, and CSS Query.
Every framework runs in his own iFrame, thus no conflicts can happen. Tests are run selector by selector, with an interval to prevent the browser from freeezing.
Tests are run in a neutral environment, no library or framework is included in the main javascript test, to avoid favoritism.
4.5 rating from 97 votes
This is great! I’ve been waiting for a test like this :)
In FF2, prototype 1.5.1 and MooTools 1.2dev are reoughly 4 times as fast as ext 1.1b1. In IE7, ext 1.1b1 is fastest, although it’s even a bit slower than in FF. Interesting…
Very cool. You cannot go by the time at the bottom because the tests that error’ed out gave a responce of 0ms which scews the results.
It would be nice if it was possible to download this tester to run it on a local server. So one could for example upgrade to newer versions or add other libraries to the list and run the benchmark again.
When running IE7 and Safari3 Beta, Safari is much faster (> 5x).
S3: Fastest Prototype (68ms), Slowest CCSQuery (778ms)
IE7: Fastest Ext (479ms), Slowest CSSQuery (4240ms)
Spocke: http://slickspeed.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
Very interesting… what surprises me is that these selectors return different amounts of matches across browsers. The number for the * selector changes between FF and IE6/7.
Also it seems that both prototype and mootools are both heavily optimized for FF while Ext is the best performer on IE6/7.
Where’s dojo.query()?
Is there a big in CSSQuery when using a div ~ div selector? Because it came back with a result of 4843 ms | 4941 found
Sorry my previous comment should read: “Is there a bug…” :)
@Yanky – yes there is a bug in cssQuery for ~ selectors.
Yes–where is dojo.query in this? 0.9 nightlies should be easy to try this with…
Firefox 2.0 in Wine is slightly faster than native FF2 ;) And another funny thing: in Virtualbox things wasn’t that slow, Mootools even finished faster than on native i386 Ubuntu Linux.
all progressive humanity is waiting for Dojo 0.9 to be added to this test suite :)
maybe when Dojo 0.9 is officially released they will add it.. wait.
Nice tests, though for the sake of a few milliseconds I know my clients thank me more for rapid development than any nerdy metrics! After various experiments I chose jQuery for its stunning ease of development, reliability and community support.
Nice. However I’m also chiming in, where is Dojo .9 ?
Nice, on my machine (win xp pro) opera kicked ass, firefox really slow and safari (beta) not far behind opera.
I got errors with cssQuery in IE7
Dojo 0.9M2 is now included in the tests.
the whole thing can also be downloaded from http://slickspeed.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
The first time I ran it, it showed MooTools as the clear winner with PT in second followed by Ext. Now it shows PT as the winner with MooTools in second. I run it again and it shows Moo & PT tied for first followed by Dojo query.
In IE 7, I see Ext, then Dojo Query, then Moo.
Why the odd results?
It looks like jQuery is not optimized for “div ~ div” slector which is taking half of the total execution time…
AVG calls out this page as having a Trojan. Careful kids
@Rey Bango – a lot of this has to do with your computer configuration, what your current cpu / mem usage is like, what browser youre using, etc. The biggest things to look for in the tests is accuracy and comparison of the number of matches to compared to the others. Speed is important yes, but when you are down in the 10s of milliseconds range, the differences are truly trivial.
@Marc Brooks – i assure you there is no Trojan on that page… you should probably look more deeply into the source of your problem and maybe consider some new antivirus software before telling the ‘kids’ to be careful. ;)
@Tom. I also get a AVG warning when Internet Explorer goes to the page and I assume this is why cssQuery is not working. All the other browsers are fine.
Oh wait…
Funnily enough its not giving me the same message today. However, I did get it yesterday.
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmootools.net%2Fslickspeed
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmootools.net%2Fslickspeed
Running tests on non-validated pages?
SAFARI beta on XP is damn fast on this test!
@Dougal Matthews – who cares.
Dougal Matthews: You don’t see that the tests actually run on other pages inside the iframes? …
Thanks for developing the test suite Valerio. The jQuery team will definitely be working on improving the selector performance after v1.1.3 is officially released. The test suite is very well designed and will certainly help us in optimizing the code.
I’m not quite sure that we’ll look at this as some type of battle, as mentioned in your blog post, but anything that helps us improve the jQuery library and project is certainly welcome. Thanks again for the test suite.
So 1.1.3 will have the same speed issues as shown here? Is there no quick-fix, is this really such a big clean-up for the jQuery code? I looked at it and tried to find a way to make it better (i’m not a jquery user, just love JavaScript) … its really hard to read the code and sure hard to maintain, wish you good luck to make that faster.
@AMÃPlin: Its not so much a matter of clean up as it is about maintaining a small file size. To optimize it further, including adding XPath support, would mean increasing the file size and we’re careful about increasing the size of the jQuery lib. Our users appreciate the sub-20k library size. We’re considering alternatives though. Thanks for looking into improvements.
AVG’s signature update from 6/14 has been updated to no longer call out the cssQuery-p.js file (packed version) as a trojan.
Just to let you know: running the testsuite (on a WinXPsp2 PC) for MooTools 993, Prototype 1.6rc0 and jQuery 1.21, I got the following results:
Firefox 2.0.0.7: MT: 239; P: 224; jQ: 757
Opera 9.22: MT: 108; P: 88; jQ: 259
Safari Beta 3.0.2: MT: 175; P: 96; jQ: 263
IE6sp1: no tests performed–crashed systematically on page loading :-(