dart-sass/perf.md

These benchamrks are informal and only intended to give us a general sense of the benefit Dart Sass could provide relative to other implementations.

This was tested against:

• libsass eee6d59 and sassc 2fcd639 compiled with g++ 4.8.4.
• Dart Sass dfecdcd on Dart 1.19.1.
• Ruby Sass e79f5cf on Ruby 2.2.4p230

on Ubuntu x64 with Intel Xeon E5-1650 v3 @ 3.50GHz.

Measurements

I ran five instances of each configuration and recorded the fastest time.

Small Plain CSS

Running on a file containing 4 instances of .foo {a: b}:

• sassc: 0.003s
• Dart Sass from source: 0.255s
• Dart Sass from a snapshot: 0.193s
• Ruby Sass with a hot cache: 0.130s

Large Plain CSS

Running on a file containing 2^17 instances of .foo {a: b}:

• sassc: 1.972s
• Dart Sass from source: 2.597s
• Dart Sass from a snapshot: 2.547s
• Ruby Sass with a hot cache: 14.484s

Based on these numbers, Dart Sass is approximately:

• 1.3x slower than libsass
• 5.7x faster than Ruby Sass

Preceding Sparse @extend

Running on a file containing .x {@extend .y}, 2^17 instances of .foo {a: b}, and then .y {a: b}:

• sassc: 2.202s
• Dart Sass from a snapshot: 2.598s
• Ruby Sass with a hot cache: 22.423s

Based on these numbers, Dart Sass is approximately:

• 1.2x slower than libsass
• 8.6x faster than Ruby Sass

Following Sparse @extend

Running on a file containing .y {a: b}, 2^17 instances of .foo {a: b}, and then .x {@extend .y}:

• sassc: 2.207s
• Dart Sass from a snapshot: 2.569s
• Ruby Sass with a hot cache: 22.221s

Based on these numbers, Dart Sass is approximately:

• 1.2x slower than libsass
• 8.7x faster than Ruby Sass

Preceding Dense @extend

Running on a file containing .bar {@extend .foo} followed by 2^17 instances of .foo {a: b}:

• sassc: 6.703s
• Dart Sass from a snapshot: 3.922s
• Ruby Sass with a hot cache: 40.193s

Based on these numbers, Dart Sass is approximately:

• 1.7x faster than libsass
• 10.3x faster than Ruby Sass

Following Dense @extend

Running on a file containing 2^17 instances of .foo {a: b} followed by .bar {@extend .foo}:

• sassc: 6.636s
• Dart Sass from a snapshot: 3.644s
• Ruby Sass with a hot cache: 39.603s

Based on these numbers, Dart Sass is approximately:

• 1.8x faster than libsass
• 10.9x faster than Ruby Sass

Conclusions

Based on this (admittedly imperfect and non-representative) data, Dart Sass is well within the desired performance bounds for large codebases. Because it eagerly tracks data for @extends, its worst case is when no @extends are present and that tracking proves unnecessary. However, even there it's only 2.2x slower than libsass, and well within a reasonable amount of time to process over 130,000 selectors.

Because of the novel structuring of @extend, we see its relative performance increase along with the amount of extension. With only one @extend it's almost on par with libsass; with hundreds of thousands, it's actually faster.

It's worth noting that Dart Sass implements @extend semantics according to [issue 1599][], while other implementations do not. This certainly simplifies the implementation and may explain some of the speed gains. However, even if other implementations could be faster, it's still the case that Dart Sass is fast enough.