St. on IT: Meet Shakker The Mano-A-Mano JavaScript Performance Testing Suite

I've started this project after several months of using Peter Higgins's TaskSpeed library as the main regression testing utility during the RightJS framework development.

TaskSpeed is a pretty well done library, but many people (including me) were complaining about its tendency to mix different tasks in one, mainly the css-selectors and stuff, so sometimes it wasn't clear what's going on. Another problem was that it provides just a total time as the summary, which is not an exactly clean way of judging about frameworks relative speed.

So I started my own little script, which become a bit bigger script and that one become even bigger one, and bigger and bigger. And now we have for ourselves practically an alternative solution for the TaskSpeed library.

Meet The Shakker!

The first difference between Shakker and TaskSpeed is that, Shakker has a two-level tests structure, the first one drives the test and keeps the data, the second one keeps the actual framework test. This way we have real-live like data separation on one side, and a blunt feature-to-feature comparison on the other. Shakker counts only the actual feature run-time for every framework, skipping utility operations like elements search, preparing collections, and stuff.

Another difference is that, Shakker not just collects the time summary, it collects differences between framework results for every test and then calculates average values between all the tests. It also let you choose one framework and evaluate it against others. This way you can have an approximated relative frameworks speed comparison.

It also keeps the original by-summary results, so that if your love sucks, you always can choose another result.

So what all this gives to you? See for your self. I'm posting results for all the modern browsers below, browsing through them you can actually see now what's going on. For example, you can clearly see, that say RightJS slows down in the building and finding operations under IE7,6 because it has to extend all the nodes manually on those browsers. You also can see where optimizations for jQuery 1.4 go, and you can see how Dojo fastly unbinds event listeners, because it doesn't have an internal events registry and makes the developer keep all the pointers manually. You also can clearly see how RightJS rips off everything under Chrome and Safari, because it doesn't uses any special proxy for dom operations, and uses common Arrays, which those browsers heavily optimize.

Lots of interesting stuff.