Posted by Marian Steinbach on 03/19/07 21:47

On 19 Mrz., 17:18, Toby A Inkster <usenet200...@tobyinkster.co.uk>
wrote:
> Marian Steinbach wrote:
> > 3) Writing XML "manually"
> > like $xml .= '<tag>'.utf8_encode($value).'</tag>';
>
> I tend to do this. Don't forget liberal use of htmlentities(). Unlike
> parsing XML, outputting XML manually is very easy, and I find that most XML
> output libraries fall into the "overkill" category.


I just did a very simple comparison of "manual XML writing" and
XMLWriter (which is supposed to be very fast). Surprisingly to me,
XMLWriter is even twice as fast as manual XML writing.

I ran creation of a simple document 10.000 times. Results:

manual.php: ~ 5 seconds
xmlwriter.php: ~ 2 secs

Here is the code I used:

manual.php:

<?php

$start = microtime(true);

require './common.inc.php';

function makeXmlDocument($short, $long) {
$ret = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<document>'."\n";
if (isset($short) && !empty($short)) {
$ret .= '<short>'.htmlspecialchars($short).'</short>'."\n";
}
if (isset($long) && !empty($long)) {
$ret .= '<long>'.htmlspecialchars($long).'</long>'."\n";
}
$ret .= '</document>';
return $ret;
}

for ($i=0; $i<$num_iterations; $i++) {
$xml = makeXmlDocument($short_string, $long_string);
}

echo 'time used: '.(microtime(true) - $start);
?>

xmlwriter.php:

<?php

$start = microtime(true);

require './common.inc.php';

function makeXmlDocument($short, $long) {
$memory = xmlwriter_open_memory();
xmlwriter_start_document($memory,'1.0','UTF-8');
xmlwriter_start_element($memory, 'document');
if (isset($short) && !empty($short)) {
xmlwriter_write_element($memory, 'short', $short);
}
if (isset($long) && !empty($long)) {
xmlwriter_write_element($memory, 'long', $long);
}
xmlwriter_end_element($memory);
$ret = xmlwriter_output_memory($memory, true);
return $ret;
}

for ($i=0; $i<$num_iterations; $i++) {
$xml = makeXmlDocument($short_string, $long_string);
}

echo 'time used: '.(microtime(true) - $start);
?>

common.php:

<?php

$num_iterations = 10000;

$short_string = 'Some Short Value';

$long_string = 'Some very long text (truncated here)';

?>

It would be interesting to see which version scales better... That
means: How would the two behave with multiple concurrent requests
(rather typical for a REST API, I guess) and with very large XML
documents (rather untypical for REST services, since lists should be
limited anyway)?

I'll test that.

Marian

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