jqMath & MathJax Timing Data

I recreated some MathJax Timing Data on my computer, and also ran the same tests in jqMath. For each test, I emptied the brower’s cache, then ran the test, and then revisited (not reloaded) the page to run the test again, presumably getting items from the browser’s cache on the second run. I used an iMac running Mac OS 10.5.8, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, and 4 GB of 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM. For Internet Explorer, I used Parallels Desktop 4 virtualization software, Windows Vista Business SP2 32-bit, and 1 GB of RAM. I rebooted each machine before starting. The browsers were Chrome 10.0.648.204 and Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.19019 (without using a MathPlayer plugin). All times are in milliseconds. For more information on these tests, and the columns in the MathJax table below, see the MathJax Timing Data page.

**MathJax**
	Chrome						Internet Explorer 8
Equations	Total	Process	Reprocess	Revisit Total	Process	Reprocess	Total	Process	Reprocess	Revisit Total	Process	Reprocess
10	2857	1934	159	849	260	160	6719	4672	766	2241	1382	796
30	4245	2736	689	1955	809	693	15994	12416	2672	7020	4267	2688
100	16588	8776	7036	14735	7278	7021	74066	52442	18609	67516	49015	18407

**jqMath**
	Chrome								Internet Explorer 8
Equations	Load	Convert	L+C	/MathJax	Revisit Load	Convert	L+C	/MathJax	Load	Convert	L+C	/MathJax	Revisit Load	Convert	L+C	/MathJax
10	598	30	628	0.23	73	24	97	0.14	776	172	948	0.16	62	203	265	0.18
30	383	71	454	0.13	74	77	151	0.12	735	531	1266	0.10	78	585	663	0.15
100	464	227	691	0.07	74	212	286	0.04	593	1625	2218	0.04	94	1837	1931	0.04

The /MathJax columns give $(\Load + \Convert)_\jqMath ∕ (\Total - \Reprocess)_\MathJax$, the approximate ratio of the jqMath and MathJax required times. As you can see, jqMath is roughly 10 times faster than MathJax. This is because MathJax actually measures and formats all the mathematical expressions and subexpressions itself, whereas jqMath just converts them to simple HTML and CSS, which is then formatted by the browser’s native code.