Introduction

One of the most important concerns raised by users is about wro4j performance. How fast is wro4j when dealing with a large number of resources applying various processors? This problem can be a crucial one for your environment which may lead to a decision whether wro4j is appropriate tool for your application or not.

The short answer to this question is: that depends. Wro4j by itself is very lightweight and fast, but its speed depends mainly on the time spent on pre/post processing resources:

TotalTime = Sum(preProcessors) + Sum(postProcessors)

In other words, if the time spent on processing is slow, the total time used to process a request is slow.

Slow Processors

Most of the processors are fast (All processors from the wro4j-core module are fast), like jsMin, cssMin, cssUrlRewriting.

There are also slow processors. It is important to understand which of them are slow and can cause a performance penalty. The wro4j-extensions module contains a dozen of additional processors, some of them being slow. In this category falls the following:

  • Processors based on Rhino -- lessCss -- sassCss -- coffeeScript -- uglifyJs -- jsLint -- jsHint --* cssLint
  • Processors based on Ruby --* rubySassCss

It is also possible that a custom processor can be a bottleneck if it performs some very complex or innefficient logic. In theory, all processors based on rhino can be replaced with a similar implementation based on java (if exist) or based on V8 javascript engine. This replacement is one of the future challenges.

It is important to mention that there were [RhinoPerformanceImprovement some progress] toward making rhino based processors to perform faster, but the results are not considerable when comparing to V8 javascript engine, because rhino is not running javascript natively.


A blog post comparing grunt with wro4j