Speed master Kris made some changes to Tango’s xml libraries today, and increased the performance of the parser to over 500MB/second! The machine is still the quad core 2.66GHz Intel box running Linux with 4GB of RAM. This run reflects revision 3286 of Tango SVN.

I will only update the images here, I think you should now know how I obtained them…

While SAX is showing slower in speed than DOM in Tango (I hope that is as weird to read as it was for me to write), you can see that the RAM usage graph puts it back into perspective.

I also forgot to note that this quad core box is now capable of parsing XML at over 2GB/sec if all 4 cores are used. Impressive indeed.

Tango is an alternate standard library for the D Programming Language.

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I decided to post a graph of speed versus resource usage as an interesting view into the overhead of the various programs. Since all benchmarks maxxed out the CPU at 100%, and all cached the data to be parsed, so disk wasn’t being used, that leaves RAM as a measurement of resource usage. The following is a chart of the parsing speed divided by the memory usage. Of note was xmlpull and xmlsax using 688KB of memory, so their numbers actually increased, showing not only the speed, but the conservation of resources. The RAM numbers were taken from top while the program was running, and represent the “Resident Set” so as not to make Java look horribly bad.

Update: 2008-02-24 15:45 PST - I updated the graph to offset the RAM usage by subtracting the file size from the total RAM, so that as the files get larger, they won’t be penalized. To put it into other words, the closer you can keep RAM usage to the filesize, decreasing overhead, the more resource efficient your parser is. I bet you are thinking Tango was designed that way from the beginning right about now, aren’t you?

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