Comment by drdec
4 years ago
If you have a lot of nesting in the XML, and it is formatted for human reading (i.e. indented), you may want to consider not doing that. We had a project where we were creating human-readable versions of the XML (mostly for developer convenience) and then parsing it. When we stopped adding all the extra white space the parsing speed increased a couple of orders of magnitude. (The downside was we no longer had built in coffee breaks in our development process.)
That's interesting. I can't think of a mechanism why this would give so much of a performance boost, though - rejecting extra whitespace should be just a matter of a simple forward scan against a small set of characters, shouldn't it?
(Or maybe in your case something was running strlen() a lot during parsing, and just the difference in file size explains the boost?)