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Execution speed

The runtime of a Momentic test largely depends on how it is crafted and the state of the system under test. A Momentic test that only attempts to achieve feature parity with a traditional testing tool such as Playwright or Cypress will run at approximately the same speed. Due to intelligent caching, over 99% of steps that run on the Momentic platform execute in under 500ms:
Preset actionAverage runtime
Click250ms
Type340ms
Choosing from a <select> element275ms
Pressing a key<5ms
Scroll<5ms
Page check attempt220ms
Element check attempt210ms
Visual diff620ms
However, any enhanced steps that require AI completions can incur greater runtime costs. These steps provide outsized value, power, and flexibility to developers at the cost of duration. The approximate first-time execution speed of each AI-enhanced action supported by Momentic is listed below. In many cases, Momentic caches AI results to reduce subsequent runtime.
AI-enhanced actionFirst-time runtime range
Locating an element4-8 seconds
Evaluating an assertion once5-8 seconds
Extracting data from the page5-8 seconds
Generating a single command in an AI action6-12 seconds
Classifying a test failure20-30 seconds
Auto-healing a section30+ seconds

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Benchmarks

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Overview

We have published a basic benchmark comparing Momentic against Playwright in this publicly accessible test automation environment. The results illustrate that cached Momentic steps are only 52ms slower on average than comparable Playwright functions. Non-cached steps that require AI to execute run on average 6354ms slower. Over 99% of all steps executed on the Momentic platform are cached. Note that this benchmark does not exhaustively test all Momentic step types, many of which do not have analogs in Playwright, Cypress, or any traditional tooling (e.g. AI check, Visual diff).

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Method

We built a Momentic test that logs into the practice automation site, as well as an equivalent Playwright script that performs the same sequence of actions. We obtained three different sets of measurements:
  • The “Steps only” category only measures the time spent executing steps in both software.
  • The “End-to-end” category includes Momentic’s fixed bootstrap (e.g. API key check) and test result upload times. For Playwright, the end-to-end time includes CLI initialization time but does not involve any upload of data.
  • The “First-run” category ran with caching explicitly disabled and thus includes the runtime of 4 fresh AI completions.
All measurements were completed on a M3 Max Macbook Pro with 36GB RAM running Mac OS Sonoma.

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Results

All values are P50 milliseconds measured over 10 independent samples.
PlaywrightMomentic
Steps only961ms1173ms
End-to-end1870ms3998ms
First-run steps onlyN/A26379ms
The source used for this benchmark is provided below: 
fileType: momentic/test
id: 48f763e2-3ace-4ac8-ba7d-36f3bf0496a2
name: Log in practice test automation
baseUrl: https://practicetestautomation.com/practice-test-login/
schemaVersion: 1.0.13
advanced:
  disableAICaching: false
retries: 1
envs: []
steps:
  - id: c0f25128-3dfe-4b79-9353-5d11eca5a15b
    type: PRESET_ACTION
    command:
      id: 72e7f915-1262-4558-9d60-4a7805fb00c7
      useSelector: false
      useXY: false
      force: false
      disableCache: false
      clearContent: true
      pressEnter: false
      type: TYPE
      target:
        type: description
        elementDescriptor: the username input
      value: student
  - id: 
    type: PRESET_ACTION
    command:
      id: 243fc113-511f-4f25-bdea-c68af30bd077
      useSelector: false
      useXY: false
      force: false
      disableCache: false
      clearContent: true
      pressEnter: false
      type: TYPE
      target:
        type: description
        elementDescriptor: the password input
      value: Password123
  - id: b46c7d74-b549-4921-9b94-d3a48c4d24ff
    type: PRESET_ACTION
    command:
      id: 52153871-0237-4847-8b33-86a7bf709246
      useSelector: false
      useXY: false
      force: false
      disableCache: false
      type: CLICK
      target:
        type: description
        elementDescriptor: the submit button
      doubleClick: false
      rightClick: false
  - id: 4f2d060e-716e-4b26-b821-6d1d170fbccb
    type: PRESET_ACTION
    command:
      id: 21003652-329b-4f13-8891-21a31cd40aa6
      type: PAGE_CHECK
      assertion:
        type: CONTENT
        value: Logged In