Comparing the Performance of IndexedDB-based Front-end Storage Libraries

Abstract

With the introduction of Progressive Web Apps, there has been a considerable rise in the tendency to store data in the browser using IndexedDB. Although it is considered a single solution for persistent client-side data storage, the API is particularly premature and complex, and its data persistence comes with security issues. Several libraries have been built to facilitate convenient implementation of IndexedDB and there is a lack of studies on comparing the performance of these libraries. Therefore, this thesis has compared two of the most popular libraries called Dexie.js and idb in three different browsers namely Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. The main purpose of this comparison was to observe the change in performance with an increase in the number of data to be stored. It was found that Dexie.js is two to four times slower than idb in its insertion operations while both libraries performed almost similarly for read operations. As this experiment has used a large data set, ranging from 50,000 to 1 million, this research has been able to find several limitations that need to be considered in the context of storing larger data sizes using IndexedDB. This research can be extended in many ways including analyzing how to eliminate the issues and improve the IndexedDB interface further to facilitate massive data saving in the browser more sustainably.