Fast XML output

Ruby
1

Hi,

we just started playing with ruby and ActiveRecord a few days ago at
my company and we’re having major troubles of outputting xml fast
enough.

Pure xml output from ActiveRecord::Base takes approx 20s for 500
objects (that are small and simple). Does anyone have any pointers?
How fast is REXML?

2

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:40:07 +0900, Michael L. wrote:

Hi,

we just started playing with ruby and ActiveRecord a few days ago at
my company and we’re having major troubles of outputting xml fast
enough.

Pure xml output from ActiveRecord::Base takes approx 20s for 500
objects (that are small and simple). Does anyone have any pointers?
How fast is REXML?

Slow as hell. We just did a refactoring today, going from xml to json to
pass AR data between apps. We achieved an order of magnitude speed
increase and profiling showed 70% of the time on the client side was
spent parsing xml and 30% on the server side creating the xml
reppresentation.

If you’re stuck with XML I’d look into a replacement for rexml.

3

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Michael L.
[email protected] wrote:

Pure xml output from ActiveRecord::Base takes approx 20s for 500
objects (that are small and simple). Does anyone have any pointers?
How fast is REXML?

Look into libxml.

–
Avdi

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4

Avdi G. [email protected] wrote:

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Michael L.
[email protected] wrote:

Pure xml output from ActiveRecord::Base takes approx 20s for 500
objects (that are small and simple). Does anyone have any pointers?
How fast is REXML?

Look into libxml.

The devil is in the details. I rewrote my XML-manipulation class to use
libxml instead of REXML and the libxml-based version of my routine takes
twice as long as the REXML-based version. So it all depends on exactly
what you do with it… m.