Re: [xml-dev] DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility

[Benjamin Franz <snowhare@nihongo.org>]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, PaulT wrote:

>
> > NOT reading/parsing and rereading/reparsing relatively static
> > XML documents gives me a huge performance boost.
>
> I was under impression that it should usually give
> about 10-15% boost. Is that 'huge' ?

Using Saxon's native 'DocumentInfo' tree in memory - an at least 10X
_plus_ performance boost on large documents vs starting from scratch with
the serialized XML document. I think that _is_ huge.

> > In fact that is the major reason why I moved from SAX
> > based XSLT rendering to DOM based rendering for the vast majority of our
> > stuff.
>
> XSLT rendering is not 'SAX based'. It is 'OM-based'.

I should have been more precise in my language; 'Live-parsed' vs
'statically cached-OM' then. Most fast renderers use a SAX stream (which
in turn usually comes from some serial format) as their XML data source
which they then convert to whatever internal OM they prefer just before
doing the XSLT rendering. There is a lot of overhead in that for large
documents.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

 "Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent
  psychopath who knows where you live."
                    -- Nancy Lebovitz, the button lady