Why you should ditch NPM UUIDv4. Faster and native, Node has you covered!

In this post, you will see the reason why you shouldn't use anymore the uuid NPM package anymore for generating Universally Unique Identifiers.

If you have worked income important backend NodeJS applications, you are probably familiar with the uuid package. However, there is a less common, but core Node module called crypto, available since NodeJS v14.17.

According to my benchmark, the core module randomUUID() from node:crypto performs better and quicker in terms of speed and reliability. Additionally, it is natively accessible in Node.js since v14.17 without the necessity of installing a 3rd-party package like uuid.

crypto.randomUUID(): 518.735ms
uuid.v4(): 532.768ms

Note: My benchmark was run with Node, v18.18.1

// Run: node benchmark-uuid-vs-core-crypto.js

// native randomUUID crypto benchmark
const { randomUUID } = require("crypto");

console.time("crypto.randomUUID()");
for (let time = 0; time < 10_000_000; time++) {
  randomUUID();
}

console.timeEnd("crypto.randomUUID()");

// uuid package benchmark
const { v4 } = require("uuid");
console.time("uuid.v4()");
for (let time = 0; time < 10_000_000; time++) {
  v4();
}
console.timeEnd("uuid.v4()");

// note, I've used 10_000_000 with _ which are numeric separators
// https://github.com/pH-7/GoodJsCode#-clearreadable-numbers

Note

crypto.randomUUID() only generates UUIDv4 (random UUIDs), not UUIDv7 for instance. To generate UUIDv7, you need to use a library like uuid.

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