HTML parsers benchmark

Simple HTML DOM parser benchmark.

Competitors

Erlang

• Mochiweb html parser. https://github.com/mochi/mochiweb/blob/master/src/mochiweb_html.erl The only real-world HTML parser for Erlang. Written on pure Erlang.

CPython

• lxml.etree.HTML http://lxml.de/ libxml2 binding. Cython
• BeautifulSoup 3 http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs3/documentation.html Pure python HTML DOM parser v3.
• BeautifulSoup 4 http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/ HTML DOM parser with pluggable backends.
• html5lib http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/ Pure python DOM parser oriented to HTML5.

PyPi

• BeautifulSoup 3
• BeautifulSoup 4
• html5lib

Node.JS

• cheerio https://npmjs.org/package/cheerio Pure JS HTML DOM parser with jQuery API
• htmlparser https://npmjs.org/package/htmlparser Pure JS HTML DOM parser
• jsdom https://npmjs.org/package/jsdom Pure JS HTML DOM parser with rich browser-like API

Ruby

• nokogiri http://nokogiri.org/ HTML/XML parser based on libxml2

C

• libxml2 http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-HTMLparser.html Written on C non-strict HTML parser.

Google Go

• gokogiri https://github.com/moovweb/gokogiri
• go-html-transform https://code.google.com/p/go-html-transform
• exp/html http://tip.golang.org/pkg/exp/html

Preparation

Install OS dependencies python-virtualenv, erlang, pypy, C compiler and libxml2 dev packages

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv python-lxml erlang-base pypy \
    libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev build-essential, nodejs, npm

Then run (it will prepare virtual environments, fetch dependencies, compile sources etc)

./prepare.sh

In case of errors, I recommended to install also cython, python-dev and retry.

To prepare only some of the platforms, define PLATFORMS environment variable:

PLATFORMS="pypy python" ./prepare.sh

RUN

Just run

./run.sh <number of parser iterations>

eg

./run.sh 5000

To run tests only for some of the platforms, define PLATFORMS envifonment variable:

PLATFORMS="pypy python" ./run.sh 5000

Results

To convert results to CSV file, use to_csv.py

./run.sh 5000 2>&1 | ./to_csv.py

or smth like

./run.sh 2>&1 | tee output.txt
./to_csv.py < output.txt

There is also R - script that can build some pretty graphs: stats/main.r.

How to add my %platformname% to benchmark set?

Create directory %platformname%

mkdir %platformname%

Create run.sh and prepare.sh scripts:

• run.sh - called every time when benchmark starts. Must use print_header() and timeit() functions from lib.sh to format output for each test. It must accept 2 arguments: HTML file path and number of iterations and pass them unchanged to benchmark scripts.
• prepare.sh - called only once, before runing any benchmarks. It can download dependencies, compile sources etc.

Create your benchmark scripts. Requirements:

• Must accept 2 arguments: path to HTML file and number of iterations
• Must read HTML file once, then perform "number of iterations" parse cycles
• Must print parser-loop runtime in seconds, calculated like start = time(); do_n_iterations(N); print time() - start
• On each iteration must build full DOM tree in memory

Add %platformname% to platforms.txt file.

How to add new HTML to benchmark?

Just create HTML file named page_<some_page_name>.html.