I'm trying to convince my management to upgrade to the new version of FitNesse (we're running 20070619 now) I saw a message by Uncle Bob at the yahoo group
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/fitnesse/message/16752
saying that's "It is much faster." - but I was wondering if anybody has any metrics, how faster it is comparing to the old one? thanks! O.
Are you using Slim or Fit style tables? How large are the pages? We saw a significant improvement when the parser was rewritten. The old parser was regex based and got slow on big pages. The new parser is a more proper parser and is much more efficient.
If I had to put a specific number on it, I would say it was 40+ percent faster, but your milage may vary based on how your tests are written.
All that said, there are a lot of great features in the newer versions. Though if you're using a 2007 version, most of those improvements are related to Slim, which was introduced after 2007. The parser improvements will be there, and a couple of other updates you might enjoy (Test History, Templates, new Theming capabilities, etc).