Performance

Previous two posts (1, 2) were about rendering performance, now it’s time for something from the back-of-the-fronted: state management. More specifically: checking the speed at which Redux Toolkit can create slices/reducers and handle dispatched actions. The RTK addressed Redux’s primary criticism: amount of boilerplate. Now (read: for many years) a couple of lines of code is enough to get fully functioning store setup with dev tools enabled, reducers with Immer, actions (creators), thunks etc. All with great TypeScript support… Plenty of nice features, but how about the speed?

I’ve recently checked whether using a Box in Material UI 5, instead of plain div, has significant performance impact. I don’t think it would matter much in practice, but read the post if you are interested in details… Doing this check got me thinking: how much faster making the little square divs would be if we were to drop React and do the DOM manipulation with plain JS? Let’s find out!

I’ve been relying on Material UI Box components quite a lot, because doing so allows use of theme-aware sx property and common attributes such as display or gap. It makes code more consistent with other uses of MUI components.

Vanilla JS cell renderers are faster than framework renderers (just like the docs suggest) but renderers created with React class components are quite decent. Unfortunately, cell renderers build with function components are noticeably worse. The grid team is aware of the issue and might fix it soon (I’ve done my test on ag-Grid 23.1.0 released just 2 days ago)… See live demo that compares different ways to render cell content and check the source code on GitHub.

Read the first part of the article if you haven’t done so already. Part 1 has a brief overview of what GC is and how it performs its magic. It contains a test of GC performance with regards to large array of bytes. You can also find there a detailed information about my test environment…

.NET GC is very fast! Well… I hope you need more than this reassuring statement, if so, read on :) I will show you some test results to prove that I’m not lying but first I will give you a quick reminder about what GC is:

Bitmap class provides two simple methods: GetPixel and SetPixel used respectively to retrieve a point of image (as the Color structure) and set a point of image. The following code illustrates how to retrieve/set all the pixels in the bitmap: