Does upgrading jQuery UI 1.7.2 to 1.8.7 result in a performance improvement?

Question

My site is only using dialogs and buttons from jQuery UI. In general things are working fine, but from time to time some users are facing light performance issues; the system is not as responsive as it should be in their opinion.

Upgrading from jQuery 1.4.2 to 1.4.4 really did a good job, because there are lots of find()/filter() calls in my code. Should I expect some performance benefits from upgrading jQuery UI?

Answer 1

There are a couple things to think about with respect to upgrading a library.

1. How difficult is it going to be to do so. Many times, if it is a minor release upgrade, you're not going to see any API changes or anything of that nature. It should be a fairly smooth process to perform the upgrade. In this case, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't perform the upgrade.
2. In the case of going to a more major release, you need to consider the API changes that could cause the upgrade to a new version of a library to take longer. It may not be just a simple idea of "drop in the new library and you're good to go." With that said, I typically try to keep my libraries as up-to-date as possible. Yeah, it may be slightly more work now, but, in the long run, it is easier to upgrade a library on a continual basis than do it once every 5 years.

As for the type of performance improvements you'll see if you upgrade to 1.8.7, check out the release notes. Not only t should you see improvements, you should also have more feature availability as well.

With all this said...

Many times, performance improvements are better affected if the code using the libraries is improved. Better algorithms, better use of structures, etc can show MUCH better improvements than just upgrading a library. I would look into this along with looking at upgrading the jQueryUI library.