Given models User and Comments being populated such that a user may have many comments…I have a view in which I want each User model to be aware of its comments, for fast lookup. But I don’t necessarily need all of the features of Collection.
On the other hand, since I use Collections to store any kind of group of models, I would like to stick to using collections for consistency sake.
My question is: is there any kind of significant performance advantage in just keeping an array of Models, rather than a Collection of models even when said collection has no event bindings?
Network wise no, you could be bringing down the exact same JSON anyway.
CPU wise, I would say any performance advantage would be extremely minimal. When you load a collection it iterates through each item in the array, converts the element to a model, binds to all model events and adds it to the models property which is an array of models. You wouldn’t see any impact from this unless you had a very high number of total comments. Have a look at the source it’s very readable.
Of course the only way to know the actual performance impact is to test it. It should be pretty easy to setup, you’d just need backbone.js, your User & Comments models/collections and JSON to load into the collections.