js-min-bench

This project attempts to create a repeatable benchmark comparing various JavaScript minifiers and options.

Read a longer blog post about what minifiers do and why this benchmark is useful.

View the current results.

Note: This is not an officially supported Google product.

Methodogy

I collected sample programs and archived them in this repo. The test runner then runs specific minifier versions against those sample programs and reports their results. Because the inputs and minifiers are pinned to specific versions, the reported output sizes should be repeatable. The timing numbers will depend on the machine the tools are run on, but their relative values are likely more or less representative of any machine.

Testing

A trivial "minifier" that took an input program and produced a 0 byte output file would get the best score on this benchmark. The only way to verify that a minifier doesn't (accidentally) cheat in this manner is by verifying that the resulting application still works after minification. For this reason, the input programs here should be applications, not frameworks or libraries, and for each application we need end-to-end tests. The benchmarker then can run the test suite for each output.

Unfortunately, I realized the need for testing too late, so this idea is currently only implemented for the todomvc results here.

Run it yourself

Dependencies

You need:

• nodejs (to run the benchmarker and uglify)
• yarn (to download more dependencies): npm i -g yarn
• brotli (a recent version)

Setup

# Install dependencies:
$ yarn
# Build code:
$ yarn run build

Run

# Run benchmark, write index.html:
$ yarn run bench