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Saulo Dias
Saulo Dias

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JavaScript: Timing the execution of a piece of code

One of the simplest ways to have a rough idea of how long a piece of code is taking to execute is by using the console methods time, timerLog, and timeEnd.

Example:

console.time("answer time");
// where `answer time` is a label to identify this timer
alert("Click to continue");
console.timeLog("answer time");
alert("Do a bunch of other stuff...");
console.timeEnd("answer time");
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Most of the time you just want to time a whole event and don't care about intermediate steps, though. Then, you just need console.time, console.timeEnd.

That's pretty much it.

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This post blew up on DEV in 2020:

js visualized

🚀⚙️ JavaScript Visualized: the JavaScript Engine

As JavaScript devs, we usually don't have to deal with compilers ourselves. However, it's definitely good to know the basics of the JavaScript engine and see how it handles our human-friendly JS code, and turns it into something machines understand! 🥳

Happy coding!