RE: Textual transmission typically faster?

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>]

> I recall one of the presenters at XTech last year had been
> experimenting with using a Java-serialized DOM rather than the source
> XML document, and was surprised to find that the Java-serialized DOM
> was both considerably larger than the *uncompressed* XML and
> considerably slower to load.

Like specific binary formats, specific serialization code can be
significantly faster. I did a test like this once in the context
of an RPC-ish infrastructure.

JAVA serialization was *much* slower than XML, but XML was *much*
slower than binary (*much* >= 2x). This was especially noticeable
for smaller units of data where Java reflection and TCP/IP packet 
latency become performance bottlenecks.

I think Rick also performed some analysis of this sort.