RE: "Binary XML" proposals

[Al Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:

> Hmmm. I ran some tests a while ago on JAVA serialization vs.
> serialization to XML, and binary RPC vs XML-RPC. I found reading
> and writing the *binary* JAVA serialization to be around 3x slower
> than writing to XML and reading it back in...

Yeah, Java serialisation is apparently quite slow as a process, I hear.

> conversely, I found XML-RPC to be about 3x slower than binary RPC.

A lot of that might be HTTP overhead :-)

Three-way handshake before you even send the request, the
connection teardown? *retch*!

> At the end of the day, there are *huge* numbers of variables
> that play a part in performance. One thing I've found is that
> the performance of the data structures that the XML encodes
> is a *huge* factor. A naive DOM implementation will take
> ages to construct, regardless of the speed of parsing.

One of the things being considered over in xml-bin now is formats with
indices on, so a DOM implementation can pull stuff from the file as needed
and no sooner. That's nice for documents that are only used for a couple
of limited XPath queries.

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software