Basic Benchmarks

I realized that previous results had the code running commonmark-java and flexmark-java parsing and rendering, while intellij-markdown and pegdown were only running parsing. Also, commonmark-java was only running with ext-gfm-tables but to make it more fair to pegdown I added ext-gfm-strikethrough and disabled auto-link extension for all parsers that have the option since it causes significant parser slow-down for all parsers:

I also added a flexmark-java configured with all extensions, except for auto-links, for an idea of how extra extensions affect performance.

File	commonmark-java	flexmark-java	flexmark-java-all	intellij-markdown	pegdown
README-SLOW	0.464ms	0.767ms	0.795ms	1.616ms	14.467ms
VERSION	0.785ms	1.013ms	1.157ms	3.537ms	41.189ms
commonMarkSpec	31.755ms	50.024ms	52.125ms	584.271ms	559.061ms
markdown_example	8.927ms	9.509ms	10.026ms	206.310ms	928.091ms
spec	4.911ms	6.149ms	6.631ms	33.870ms	286.549ms
table	0.228ms	0.564ms	0.595ms	0.653ms	3.269ms
table-format	1.245ms	1.934ms	2.673ms	3.602ms	22.231ms
wrap	3.298ms	6.951ms	7.403ms	14.687ms	80.052ms

Ratios of above:

File	commonmark-java	flexmark-java	flexmark-java-all	intellij-markdown	pegdown
README-SLOW	1.00	1.65	1.71	3.48	31.20
VERSION	1.00	1.29	1.47	4.50	52.46
commonMarkSpec	1.00	1.58	1.64	18.40	17.61
markdown_example	1.00	1.07	1.12	23.11	103.96
spec	1.00	1.25	1.35	6.90	58.35
table	1.00	2.47	2.61	2.86	14.35
table-format	1.00	1.55	2.15	2.89	17.86
wrap	1.00	2.11	2.24	4.45	24.27
-----------	---------	---------	---------	---------	---------
overall	1.00	1.49	1.58	16.44	37.49

File	commonmark-java	flexmark-java	flexmark-java-all	intellij-markdown	pegdown
README-SLOW	0.60	1.00	1.04	2.11	18.86
VERSION	0.77	1.00	1.14	3.49	40.65
commonMarkSpec	0.63	1.00	1.04	11.68	11.18
markdown_example	0.94	1.00	1.05	21.70	97.61
spec	0.80	1.00	1.08	5.51	46.60
table	0.40	1.00	1.06	1.16	5.80
table-format	0.64	1.00	1.38	1.86	11.49
wrap	0.47	1.00	1.06	2.11	11.52
-----------	---------	---------	---------	---------	---------
overall	0.67	1.00	1.06	11.03	25.16

• VERSION.md is the version log file I use for Markdown Navigator
• commonMarkSpec.md is a 33k line file used in intellij-markdown test suite for performance evaluation.
• spec.txt commonmark spec markdown file in the commonmark-java project
• hang-pegdown.md is a file containing a single line of 17 characters [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ which causes pegdown to go into a hyper-exponential parse time.
• hang-pegdown2.md a file containing a single line of 18 characters [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ which causes pegdown to go into a hyper-exponential parse time.
• wrap.md is a file I was using to test wrap on typing performance only to discover that it has nothing to do with the wrap on typing code when 0.1 seconds is taken by pegdown to parse the file. In the plugin the parsing may happen more than once: syntax highlighter pass, psi tree building pass, external annotator.
• markdown_example.md a file with 10,000+ lines containing 500kB+ of text.
• table.md is a file with a fairly large table to test table parsing performance