Parcel vs Vite vs Turbopack HMR Benchmark

Based on this benchmark by Evan You, creator of Vite.

Methodology

1. There are 3 projects in this repo: Next.js 13 with Turbopack, Vite with SWC plugin, and Parcel.

2. genFiles.(m)js is run in each project to generate 1000 components. All components are imported in the app's root component (in Next's case, the root page component) and rendered together. This step is already done and the files are already checked in, but the script is included for reference.

3. For Next, app/page.js has the 'use client' directive so it renders in client mode. This is necessary to ensure proper comparison, since server components incurs non-trivial HMR overhead (4x slower).

4. Start the projects by running yarn dev in each project, and open the page in Chrome.

5. Run update.mjs within each project, with either leaf or root as an argument. This updates either the leaf or root components respectively, which renders the current time in the browser at the time React rerenders minus the time the file was written. This measures the total amount of time taken from saving a change to seeing it reflected.

Numbers

• Recorded over 5 runs
• Time in ms
• Tested on M1 Ultra Mac Studio

	Vite (root)	Vite (leaf)	Turbopack (root)	Turbopack (leaf)	Parcel (root)	Parcel (leaf)
1	285	147	292	58	94	38
2	291	143	262	57	94	38
3	296	140	274	57	87	36
4	302	145	275	57	81	37
5	292	144	271	56	87	38
Average	293.5	143.8	274.8	57	88.6	37.4

Notes

• macOS FSEvents adds ~13 ms of latency between when a file is modified to when tools start building. That latency is included in these results.
• Parcel is 34% faster than Turbopack, and 74% faster than Vite at updating the leaf component.
• Parcel is 68% faster than Turbopack, and 70% faster than Vite at updating the root component.