Will XML eat the web?

[Michael.Kay at icl.com]

> From: Matthew Sergeant (EML) [mailto:Matthew.Sergeant at eml.ericsson.se]
> 
> Server based XML processing
> 
> XML processing is a
> resource hog. There's not really much you can do about it. 
> Sure, you can use DCOM or Corba to distribute processing your XML across 
> several servers - that's throwing hardware at the problem - not always the
best 
> solution. You can use a persistent parsed structure like a DOM maintained 
> in memory, but for some applications such as a rapidly changing XML
database 
> this isn't always feasible (or is it?). Currently our web based XML 
> system processes about 5 files per second (very subjective figures)...

How big are your XML files? My experience is that provided you split the
data up into "page-sized chunks" and only parse the data the user wants to
see, you can get much higher performance than this. Also, I've found that an
XML-to-HTML conversion that works in a serial pass using a SAX parser (with
SAXON, of course) is faster than anything that involves using a DOM or
de-serialising Java objects, and is negligible compared with the cost of
reading the XML from a relational database or interpreting an ASP script.
But of course, what's true with 2Kb XML files may not be true with 200Kb. 

Mike Kay

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