console.time & console.timeEnd

By  on  

The console.time and console.timeEnd methods allow developers to time any routine and get a duration in milliseconds.  Since JavaScript performance is becoming increasingly important, it's good to know basic techniques for benchmarking routines.  One of the most basic benchmarking tools is console.time with console.timeEnd.

console.time starts the time and console.timeEnd stops the timer and spits out the duration:

// Kick off the timer
console.time('testForEach');

// (Do some testing of a forEach, for example)

// End the timer, get the elapsed time
console.timeEnd('testForEach');

// 4522.303ms (or whatever time elapsed)

Passing a timer name as the first argument allows you to manage concurrent timers.  The console.timeEnd call immediately spits out the elapsed time in milliseconds.

There are more advanced techniques for performance testing and benchmarking but console.time/timeEnd provide a quick manual method for speed testing!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. no necessary label, the default label is default

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!