jQuery 1.2.6 and jQuery 1.3 class selector performance benchmark

Reading about the jQuery 1.3's new selector engine Sizzle and its speed improvements I thought I would do a performance comparison between jQuery 1.2.6 and jQuery 1.3. I was prepared for something good, but the test results blew my mind.

I had a page with one unordered list with 1000 items each with a class (class="1", class="2", etc).

Here is  are the tests and results:

console.time("testClass");
for(i=0;i<100;i++){
    $('.'+i);
}
console.timeEnd("testClass");

  
/**
* jQuery 1.2.6

1235 ms
1326 ms
1342 ms
=======
1301 ms

*/ 
  
/**
* jQuery 1.3

54 ms
52 ms
53 ms
=======
53 ms

*/
       

As you can see the new selector engine is freakishly fast :) Actually with this specific test it is 25 times fast. Taking into the consideration that class selection is one of the most used selectors, we can assume that our code will work considerably faster.

NOTE:
I have performed the same  tests with selection with id's. The result were exactly the same (9 ms). Taking into the consideration that both versions of jQuery use browser's built in getElementById() function for ID selections, there is not much one can do to beat that.