Benchmarking State Management Libraries in Data-Heavy React Apps

Elina concluded that while there are performance differences, all libraries were fast enough for real users, and the choice of library should fit the existing application structure and data thinking.

A key takeaway is that propagation differences are in milliseconds, whereas rendering work is significantly larger, so choosing a library that aligns with your application's existing structure is more important for performance.

Elina is a front-end developer at Physics X.

The application used for the experiment is called Optimizer, an engineering tool for running and exploring optimization jobs.

The application originally used the Recoil state management library.

Elina needed to switch from Recoil because it was archived.

Lina compared Zustand, Redux Toolkit, Recoil, Jotai, and MobX in the experiment.

The main performance metrics measured were save-to-state time, time to update the state with new data, and render time.

Performance is also about how well the application fits the state library, including the design of state shape and subscription boundaries.

Elina's experiment focuses on swapping state management libraries in a production application and measuring their performance to see if the choice significantly affects performance.