Introduction
My company is currently working on a project based on Thymeleaf 2.1.4. In the forum we found an announcement that Thymeleaf 3 is coming and so we asked ourselves how big the performance change will be between Thymeleaf 2.x and Thymeleaf 3.x.
Also there was a comment about a speed change from 1000 pages per second to 11000 pages per second, but there was no comparison to other template frameworks like Mustache or Freemaker. Therefore we will do a small comparison here.
Benchmark software
For this case we use the template benchmark created by Mitchell Bösecke. The nice thing about this benchmark is, that it also has a few warmup rounds, so that the JVM returns „real“ results.
Note: We have used a SNAPSHOT version, which is something like a alpha/beta version. Therefore treat the results with caution.
Testing machine: Macbook Pro Retina 13 with 8GB RAM and Intel Core i5 with 2.6 GHz.
Benchmark with Thymeleaf 2.1.4.RELEASE
| Benchmark | Mode | Cnt | Score | Error | Units |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freemarker.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 12731,812 | ± 145,537 | ops/s |
| Mustache.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 18222,71 | ± 205,985 | ops/s |
| Pebble.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 27371,882 | ± 392,471 | ops/s |
| Thymeleaf.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 1047,699 | ± 32,821 | ops/s |
| Trimou.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 14395,23 | ± 535,186 | ops/s |
| Velocity.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 16366,856 | ± 209,496 | ops/s |
Benchmark with Thymeleaf 3.0 Snapshot
| Benchmark | Mode | Cnt | Score | Error | Units |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freemarker.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 13134,939 | ± 304,043 | ops/s |
| Mustache.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 18827,112 | ± 181,07 | ops/s |
| Pebble.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 27697,279 | ± 683,000 | ops/s |
| Thymeleaf.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 2943,03 | ± 231,809 | ops/s |
| Trimou.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 15062,598 | ± 191,149 | ops/s |
| Velocity.benchmark | thrpt | 50 | 16142,213 | ± 649,104 | ops/s |
Conclusion
In our case the benchmark shows an improvement of Thymeleaf 3.0 (Snapshot) being nearly 3 times faster than Thymeleaf 2.1.4. In comparison to the other template engines Thymeleaf is in this use case still slow ;-)