From: ser@... (Sean Russell)
Date: 2004-02-14T12:29:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8.1 REXML performance

Steven Jenkins <steven.jenkins@ieee.org> wrote in message news:<402B8EFE.6000202@ieee.org>...
> Good luck with the 1.8 work. I use REXML in a couple of simple but 
> important applications. I'm happy with it overall. Performance, as you 
> note, could be better, but it's not a show-stopper.

Yeah, well... I think REXML is at the point where I'm squeezing
optimizations out of it.  Many of the optimizations I've tried have
made things worse, and I end up backing them out.  I'm not out of
ideas yet, but I doubt that we'll ever see an order of magnitude
improvement, until I write an optional back-end that makes use of a
native parsing library.

One thing you can do, though, is drop out of the advanced API and use
the light parser.  The light parser API is pretty limited, at the
moment; it'll be a lot more useful when I get it hooked into XPath,
but it should nearly double the speed of parsing.  It does this by
eschewing the heavy, traditional, REXML tree objects.  The price is
that you don't get all of the neat helper functions; at that point,
you're dealing with pretty raw data.  The API isn't well documented
yet, but it works.

--- SER