Now that we have a firm understanding of the underpinnings of React we can begin to look at potential bottlenecks and their solutions. We'll start with a little quiz about how React chooses when to render a component.
Yes. Absolutely. Always, unless `shouldComponentUpdate` returns false, which is not even an option with functional components and is discouraged for class based components. So if we have a large tree of components and we change state high in the tree React will be constantly re-rendering large parts of the tree. (This is common because app state often has to live up high in the tree because props can only be passed down.) This is clearly very inefficient so why does React do it?
If you remember back to when we implemented the render algorithm you'll recall that React does nothing to see if a component actually needs to re-render, it only tests whether DOM elements need to be replaced or removed. Instead React always renders all children. React is effectively off-loading the descision to re-render to the components themselves because a general solution has poor performance.
Originally React had `shouldComponentUpdate` to solve this issue but the developers of React found that for users implementing it correctly was difficult and error prone. Programmers would add new props to a component but forget to update `shouldComponentUpdate` with the new props causing the component to not update when it should which led to strange and hard to diagnose bugs. So if we shouldn't use `shouldComponentUpdate` what tools are we left with?
And it's a great question because unneeded renders can be a massive bottleneck, especially on large lists of components. In fact, there is no other way to control renders; React will always render.
But there is still hope. While we can't control if our component will render, what if instead of just always re-running all of our render code on each render, we instead kept a copy of the result of the render and next time React asks us to re-render we just return the result we saved? Now that, with two modifications, is exactly what we will do.
Obviously we can't just render once and then forever return that result because our state and props might change. So we also need to track the state and props and only return our cached result if they haven't changed.
As you may have already noticed this is a common solution in Computer Science for such problems: memoization. What we want is to memoize our components.
TODO Note: explain memoization
This is indeed such a common bottleneck and solution that React provides an API to facilitate it.
We will learn about this API by first looking at the signatures of the React API itself, then we will extend our React implementation from chapter one to support the same API. Then we will discuss its usage and analyze when and how to use it.
The first API React provides that we will look at is `React.memo`. `React.memo` is a higher-order component (HOC) that wraps your functional component. It handles partially memoizing your component based on its props (not state). If your component contains `useState` or `useContext` hooks it will re-render when the state or context changes.
It is important to note that while React named their function "memo" it is more like a partial memoization compared to the usual definition of memoization. Normally in memoization when a function is given the same inputs as a previous invocation it will just return a stored result, however, with React's `memo` only the *last* invocation is memoized. So if you have a prop that alternates between two different values React's `memo` will always re-render the component whereas with traditional memoization the component would only ever get rendered twice in total.
It takes two arguments, one required and one optional. The required argument is the component you want to memoize. The second and optional argument is a function that allows you to tell React when your component will produce the same output.
If the second argument is not specified then React performs a *shallow* comparison between props it has received in the past and the current props. If the current props match props that have been passed to your component before, React will use the output stored from that previous render instead of rendering your component again. If you want more control over the prop comparison, like if you wanted to deeply compare some props, you would pass in your own `areEqual?`. However, it's generally recommended to program in a more pure style instead of using `areEqual?` because it can suffer from the same problem that `shouldComponentUpdate` did.
`React.PureComponent` is very similar to `React.memo`, but for class based components. Like `React.memo`, `React.PureComponent` memoizes the component based on a shallow comparison of its props and state.
Here is the signature for `React.PureComponent`:
{format: "javascript"}
```
class Pancake extends React.PureComponent {
...
}
```
## Adding support for memoization to our React
Implementing full-blown memoization would be outside the scope of this book but since React only memoizes the last render it is quite easy for us to add `memo` support.
The most interesting part of the `memo` implementation is the default `areEqual` implementation. This is the implementation components will use if they don't provide their own. To see if `memo` can return a previous render or not it compares the props to see if they are the same use the following `defaultAreEqual` function. This what that looks like:
`oldProps` and `newProps` are objects containing the previous render's props and the current render's props. Much of the function is just boilerplate to ensure the prop objects are the same type and shape. The important part is noted in the loop where we use JavaScript's `Object.is` method to compare each prop object's values.
I> If you're not familiar with `Object.is`, it is nearly the same as the identity operator `===` except it treats `-0` and `+0` as equal but not does not treat `Number.NaN` as equal to `NaN`.
It is important to notice that if a prop value is an object then we are *not* testing its contents, only whether the objects themselves are the same object or not. For example, if we have two props `a` and `b` set to the following objects that look the same they will cause `defaultAreEqual` to return false.
{format: "javascript"}
```
const a = { x: 1 };
const b = { x: 1 };
Object.is(a, b); // false
```
Even though `a` and `b` look like the same object they are in fact instances of two different objects and will therefore cause `memo` to not find a match and your component will re-render. Using object literals, like in the example above, as prop values is a very common pattern that will "break" memoization of a component.
This is also a potential pitfall in another way:
{format: "javascript"}
```
const a = { x: 1 };
const b = a;
Object.is(a, b); // true
a.x = 2;
Object.is(a, b); // true
```
In this example it may be obvious that `a` still equals `b` at the end but in React applications this is often less clear because the object being used as a prop is coming from somewhere else. The lesson to watch out for is that if you pass the same object to a memoized component while changing that object's contents between renders the memoized component won't know that the contents have changed and will instead return a cached render instead of doing what you probably are expecting: re-rendering. So the overall lesson when using objects in props with memoized components is that objects with the same contents should be the same object and objects with different contents should be different objects. If managing this is a problem in your application there are immutability libraries that you can use that can help out.
As you can see there is a cost to memoizing a component both in computer resources and programmer effort so it is important to only apply memoization when a component needs it and will benefit from it.
If a component only renders a few times or infrequently it is not a good candidate for memoization since it is unlikely that a memoized render result will get returned and even if it does it is unlikely to make up for the cost of implementing and using it unless its rendering process is unusually computationally intense.
Another case when memoization is not a good idea is when the props for a component are not often the same as a previous render. Like take, for example, a component that renders the current hours, minutes, and seconds and receives those inputs as props. Unless you're rendering that component multiple times per second the props will never be the same as a previous render. So if you were to memoize that component you would be using CPU cycles for the memoization process and filling up memory with render results without ever being able to re-use a render.
Here some rules for working with memoized components:
* Don't use object literals
* Don't modify objects
* Objects with the same contents should be the same instance
* Use memoization: on components that get called frequently
* Use memoization: when props will often be the same for multiple renders in succession
* Use memoization: to prevent part of the component tree from re-rendering
And finally we have the `memo` implementation:
{format: "javascript"}
```
function memo(component, areEqual = defaultAreEqual) {
let oldProps = [];
let lastResult = false;
return (props) => {
const newProps = propsToArray(props);
if (lastResult && areEqual(oldProps, newProps) {
return lastResult;
} else {
lastResult = component(props);
oldProps = newProps;
return lastResult;
}
};
}
```
`memo` is quite straightforward. We just store the previous props and result and if the new props match the old props we return the last result. In React this is also connected to the `useState` and `useContext` hooks so that whenever state is changed a re-render is forced and the result stored.
Of course, you can provide your own `areEqual` implementation instead of using the default shallow comparison version. When might this make sense and are there any performance considerations in doing so?
The default shallow comparison method is relatively fast so by itself it is unlikely to be a performance bottleneck so the only reason to implement your own version is if you want `areEqual` to do a deeper comparison of the props, like comparing the contents of objects passed as props or the contents of arrays. You could just write your own implementation that does more involved comparisons on the props that you want it to but that is also a potential pitfall. Like if another developer adds a new prop to the component but doesn't realize there is a custom `areEqual` implementation the component will break since it won't detect when the new prop has a new value and therefore won't trigger a new render. A better approach is to use a generic deep comparison procedure that does a deep comparison on all props but this can easily become a performance bottleneck so use it with care (and is likely the reason React doesn't use it by default).
