Browser Data Processing Library Benchmarks

Recent developments in web assembly, browser APIs and data formats (Arrow & Parquet) have made it possible to efficiently run moderately complex data manipulation operations on the client side. This in-browser benchmark compares the performance of different data processing libraries including, Arquero, SQLite WASM and DuckDB WASM across a variety of transactional and analytical queries.

Each test fetches the 1,000,000 Bandcamp sales dataset before running the tests on a separate browser thread. Try running the benchmarks directly in your browser!

Data

1,000,000 Bandcamp sales with 24 columns. Approximate size - 301mb uncompressed, 74mb parquet zstd (used in Arquero and DuckDB), 100mb Gzip DB (used in SQLite).

Library Comparisons

• Arquero with parquet wasm
• SQLite WASM, in memory
• SQLite WASM, in memory, with indexes
• SQLite, OPFS
• DuckDB WASM, in memory
• DuckDB, HTTPFS

Results

Note: Data fetching and loading timings are included in the benchmark but should be taken with a grain of salt as they are dependent on the network and the browser's cache.

11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @2.80GHz Windows Laptop and Chrome 116:

Test	arquero	danfo	sqlite	sqlite (indexed)	sqlite (OPFS)	sqlite (OPFS + SAH)	duckdb	duckdb (HttpFS)
Fetch data	3.009	16.86	2.661	2.483	2.438	4.951	1.508	n/a
Load data	2.866	n/a	0.893	3.907	0.832	2.089	4.309	0.463
Test 1: SELECT top level metrics - overall count, mean and total sales	0.067	0.193	0.376	0.103	2.402	0.72	0.014	0.859
Test 2: SELECT group by day and count daily sales and total revenue	1.05	4.068	0.638	0.005	2.603	1.181	0.163	1.648
Test 3: SELECT for each item type, slug type combination the top 5 countries by overall counts	4.847	3.413	1.432	0.165	3.311	1.938	0.114	1.477
Test 4: SELECT 10 random rows	0.517	1.665	0.991	0.002	12.033	2.412	0.032	7.325
Test 5: CREATE an index	n/a	n/a	0.573	n/a	2.51	0.86	0.24	n/a
Test 6: SELECT 1000 random rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.054	0.065	3.795	0.1	1.048	n/a
Test 7: UPDATE 2 fields in 1000 rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.038	0.062	42.316	16.411	0.588	n/a
Test 8: INSERT 1000 rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.041	0.078	51.042	15.851	1.397	n/a
Test 9: DELETE 1000 rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.035	0.064	48.147	15.546	2.376	n/a

Apple M2 Macbook Air and Firefox 117:

Test	arquero	danfo	sqlite	sqlite (indexed)	sqlite (OPFS)	sqlite (OPFS + SAH)	duckdb	duckdb (HttpFS)
Fetch data	2.257	9.487	2.847	1.968	1.498	1.221	1.084	n/a
Load data	1.707	n/a	0.206	2.788	0.12	0.69	4.081	0.303
Test 1: SELECT top level metrics - overall count, mean and total sales	0.051	0.082	0.259	0.074	1.846	1.091	0.007	0.554
Test 2: SELECT group by day and count daily sales and total revenue	0.634	2.73	0.476	0.001	2.185	1.35	0.169	1.123
Test 3: SELECT for each item type, slug type combination the top 5 countries by overall counts	0.852	3.53	1.025	0.119	2.725	1.909	0.132	0.903
Test 4: SELECT 10 random rows	0.374	1.364	0.76	0.001	10.292	5.691	0.02	4.356
Test 5: CREATE an index	n/a	n/a	0.415	n/a	2.101	1.344	0.207	n/a
Test 6: SELECT 1000 random rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.02	0.025	0.923	0.089	0.748	n/a
Test 7: UPDATE 2 fields in 1000 rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.021	0.034	10.986	0.673	0.291	n/a
Test 8: INSERT 1000 rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.025	0.043	14.697	0.735	0.55	n/a
Test 9: DELETE 1000 rows with an index	n/a	n/a	0.019	0.036	13.757	0.717	0.576	n/a

Development

You have sqlite3 and duckdb installed and available on the system's path.

1. Clone the repository and yarn install
2. scripts/download.sh to retrieve bandcamp csv data
3. scripts/create-parquet.sh to create a compressed zstd parquet file
4. scripts/create-db.sh to create a sqlite db file
5. yarn dev to start the dev server (fetches local data)
6. node scripts/upload-to-r2.js to upload the files to Cloudflare R2 storage. Please set .env variables for R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID, R2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY and ENDPOINT.
7. yarn build to build the site and yarn preview to preview the prod build.

Prior Art

• wa-sqlite - SQLite variants focused and mostly transactional queries. Thanks for the template and inspiration!
• DuckDB versus - DuckDB-Wasm vs sql.js vs Arquero vs Lovefield on the TPC-H benchmark (analytical queries). More statistically robust, runs on node.js and not directly on the browser.