Comments on: Fast min/max in arrays

By: fpiat

fpiat — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:35:32 +0000

I’m running FF 3.5.3 too and also get other results:
- the optmized for is always the faster
- as the array grows the Math.max take more and more time and became the slower

By: MarcusT

MarcusT — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:01:47 +0000

I’m running FF 3.5.3 and also get disappointing results (virtually identical every time):

Array creation:	161	ms
For loop:	13	ms
Optmized for:	14	ms
Math.max:	21	ms

Even so, the one liner is infinitely preferable in use to the alternatives.

By: Marcel Duran

Marcel Duran — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:54:56 +0000

Thanks Karl,

The problem with Chrome and Safari is likely to be related to Webkit engine. That test page has a default array size of one million random numbers which is too much for those browsers. They complain either about apply not supporting one million arguments or maximum call stack size exceeded.
I’ve updated that page adding a try/catch block showing the error message when error occurs. If you reduce the array size, let’s say to 100 thousand it works on those browsers but with a much worse performance.

By: Karl

Karl — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:52:52 +0000

That’s a quite an interesting snippet but for some reason I didn’t get the same results on FireFox 3.5(.3).

For loop: 15 ms
Optmized for: 13 ms
Math.max: 22 ms

So I decided to test this on some other browsers and IE 6 – 8 as well as Opera 10 showed significantly faster speeds on Math.max.apply. However the method does not work with Chrome or Safari.