Re: XMLP WG Response on "SOAP and the Internal Subset"

In response to:

> > ....... Doing general entity substitution beyond that mandated by
> > XML 1.0 (e.g. <) implies a degree of buffer management, often
> > data copying, etc. which can be a noticeable burden when going for
> > truly high performance.  This performance effect has been reported
> > by workgroup members who are building high performance SOAP
> > implementations.

"Larry Masinter" <LMM@acm.org> writes:

> We couldn't find a first-hand account of such performance effects on
> implementations that allow entity substitutions, in cases where such
> entity substitutions aren't used, and if you have them, it would be
> very helpful if you could share them. It was easy to imagine that
> there might be issues of code footprint, but not cases where there was
> actually a performance impact if entity definitions weren't actually
> used. Were there details with any of these reports of 'performance
> effects'?

I cannot document performance effects, but I worked on an XML
processor for embedded (small footprint) applications.  Supporting
entity substitutions other than the required minimum would have had a
fairly large effect on code size and complexity.  The largest and most
troublsome effect was on the buffer management - the minimum required
entities are all larger than the text that they turn into internally,
so they just collapse the data within the existing buffer(s), but
that's not true in the general case.

Received on Tuesday, 10 December 2002 23:22:05 UTC