3 posts tagged with "performance"

Every front-end project using Vitest reaches this question at some point: environment: 'jsdom' or environment: 'happy-dom'?

The answer you usually find is "happy-dom is 2 to 4 times faster". I went looking for where that number comes from and, in most articles, it has no code, no methodology and no versions. So I decided to measure it.

I built a suite with 240 React component tests and ran it in both environments, under different Vitest configurations, several times. I also checked 20 browser APIs and behaviors in both to see what each one actually implements. The result has a surprise: Vitest's configuration matters more than the choice of library.

If you follow the React ecosystem closely, you've probably tripped over this announcement this week. Dominic Gannaway launched Octane, described as "the React programming model, compiled". It's the declared successor to Inferno, the framework Gannaway himself built back in 2016 with the same performance pitch.

It's worth pausing to understand two things. First, what it actually does technically. Second, and more important for anyone making stack decisions, what its arrival says about where React is heading.

Introduction​

This is a very important topic because it directly impacts how an application is presented to the user. If this topic is neglected, no matter how good your site or application's purpose is, it may end up suffering from slowness and unnecessary resource usage, affecting the end user — who may give up on using the application altogether. Imagine an e-commerce site where product pages load slowly; you would certainly give up on continuing to use it.

Web application optimization is something fundamental that is often overlooked. Performance improvement aims for speed, responsiveness, smoothness, resource efficiency, and much more. There are various strategies to minimize page load times and reduce server response times, making the system much more appealing to the end user.

There are many ways to approach this topic. In this article, I bring some key areas that are very relevant for making your application more efficient, with smarter resource usage, and delivering all the speed and reliability benefits to the end user.