XML Shootout Musings

For the curious the results of a full benchmark run against the Simple
English Wikipedia (http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) are
available at http://gist.github.com/258903

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Petr Pajas <[email protected]> wrote:
> A note to the benchmarks: looking briefly just at two of
> them:XML::LibXML::Reader and XML::CompactTree::XS, it seems to me that
> the second does much more than the first one (sort of a validation,
> extracting revision info etc), OTOH, the reader test (and thus the CT
> as well) can probably be made faster by the use of the "fast forward"
> reader methods like nextElement() (provided one does not care about
> intermediate elements).

I got quite a bit more performance from XML::LibXML::Reader by having
it jump to specific elements instead of just moving element by element
and checking which one we are currently at. I was able to eek only a
slight performance increase out of XML::CompactTree and friends but
CompactTree is doing a lot more work than XML::LibXML::Reader is
that's for sure; I'm not sure what I can do to speed it up more.

>
> Which leads me to an idea (though I don't have the time I could spend
> on realizing it): it would be nice to set up a long running "XML
> parsing module context" with a set of exact simple assignments (tasks
> like `extract this and that from this XML file') that the contestants
> (the authors or other enthusiasts) would attempt to solve in the most
> efficient way using their specific module; the criteria would be
> correctness of the result, performance benchmarks, and maybe size of
> the code (if not code prettiness which I don't know how to measure)?
>

I'm thinking along those same lines and have been trying to get people
to bite with the Wikipedia shootout; I'm happy I've gotten some
nibbles though. To do it properly there should probably be more XML
file formats to play with all though for me processing small files is
not very exciting and (fortunately) there doesn't seem to be very many
large real-world XML files out there. What other sorts of XML
benchmarks do you think would be reasonable for people to play with?

Tyler Riddle

-- 
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent
the universe. -- Carl Sagan
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