smckearney 's Public Library

Several observations can be made concerning the perceived performance issue of XML. First and foremost, because the XML application can only go as fast as the XML parsers can process XML messages, performance is actually not an issue of XML per se, but instead an issue of the XML parsing layer. If an XML routing application (assuming minimum overhead at the application layer) can't keep pace with incoming XML messages at a gigabit per second, it's most likely because the throughput of XML parsing is less than that of the network. Consequently, the correct way to boost the application performance is to optimize the XML parsing layer. Just like tuning any software applications, the best way to do it is to discover then find ways to reduce or eliminate the overhead in XML parsers.

The results confirmed my early suspicion that the overhead of object allocation overwhelmingly bottlenecks DOM parsing and, to a lesser (but still significant) degree, SAX parsing as well.