XML Performance question

[roddey at us.ibm.com]

>Following the XML for the last couple month, I am surprised how little
>attention is paid to performance. My=A0 optimistic personality leads me =
>to he conclusion that performance is not an issue.
>

Sorry for the late response, but I've been on vacation (at least I think
that's what that was...)

Actually, IMHO, performance is critical, and its really hard to make a
fully conforming parser that is flexible, maintainable, and fast. Partly
its because some of the kind of arcane XML rules were not written with
performance in mind particularly. I think that performance matters as much
on the small end of the spectrum as the large as well. Yes, you want to be
able to do a 32MB file in a few seconds. But you also have to consider the
e-bidness stuff, in which you might have to create a parser (since its part
of a stateless server thingy and can't just hang around), parse a small
transaction file, and clean up that parser (and whatever under/overlying
infrastructure it required) very fast.

If you see a parser that is way, way out ahead of the field on performance
on a wide array of source input, you should probably be suspicious that it
is either not really fully conforming to the spec or is extremely
inflexible for future expansion (or both.)



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