jLinq Performance Analyzed

After writing this post I went back and rewrote jLinq from the ground up to improve performance.

So here is something interesting. Another developer named Dan Stocker has been working on a Javascript sorting library named jOrder and used jLinq for comparing benchmarks. The results are interesting to say the least.

Dan has a good write up of the results in the wiki for his project.

I'm disappointed, but in a good way. I thought jLinq was 'good enough'. It performed the way it should and that was good enough for me. These results tell a much different story.

jLinq probably performs well in typical scenarios, whereas these benchmarks are for medium to large arrays queried thousands of times. I've used it in several projects with great results.

Regardless, jLinq clearly performs slower than it should. Reviewing the jLinq code I can think of a few potential pain points.

1. The entire jLinq object and all of the commands are generated each time a query is started. jLinq there should be a way to cache a standard jLinq object and only rebuild it when needed.
2. jLinq uses a lot of evals that probably could have been avoided if I understood Javascript better at the time. This undoubtedly is going to cause a significant performance hit.

jLinq was written just about a year and a half ago and I've since learned some of the finer parts of Javascript which would most likely improve the performance of the library. In fact, seeing this review has really inspired me to get into back into the project and see what kind of improvements I can make.

I appreciate Dan showing these results to me. Sharing your code with others is a great way to get feedback about what you write... even if it is a kick in the butt.