Christian has some interesting thoughts, results and code up here, parsing a 10Mb XML document with PHP5’s XML apis. Highlights the trade off between performance and memory use when using DOM vs. Sax / XMLReader.
Personally a little surprised that XMLReader proved faster than SAX. “Pull style” XML parsers are usually implemented by “re-routing” a SAX parser and from a quick glance at the libxml2 source, it seems to do the same. I guess executing alot of callback functions at a C level is faster than executing them up at the PHP level.
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Harry, you’re right. PHP Functions calls are really really slows compared to C function calls. And in SAX, there are a lot of them (on the PHP level), while with XMLReader you have almost none, just the while() looping.
May 10th, 2004 at 4:43 pm