Comments on: Building XML

By: jackson

jackson — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:33:11 +0000

I also mentioned it in Hidden Object Allocations, but you're right that I've never explicitly tested the performance. It's a great idea though so I'll add it to my list. Thanks for the tip!

By: skyboy

skyboy — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:16:16 +0000

I attempted to find an article where you tested the speed of concatenating strings, but this is the most relevant I found via search. You should run an article showing the difference between str += str, str += "data", and buffer.writeUTFBytes(str). I believe that in v11 the former has been sped up to more closely match the latter; though I'm uncertain (something you could cover). For single characters there's also buffer[inx] = charCode and writeByte (anything over 0x7F requires UTF-8 encoding to be applied manually). I've also written a StringBuffer class similar to what you'd find in a language like Java.

By: jackson

jackson — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:55:06 +0000

Unfortunately it’s not available in AS3, AS2, or JavaScript. Maybe one day there will be a port.

By: anon-anon

anon-anon — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:37:04 +0000

You may want to look at vtd-xml as the state of the art in XML processing, consuming far less memory than DOM http://vtd-xml.sf.net

By: mels

mels — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:05:11 +0000

1.7 Ghz Intel , 1GB RAM (?), Windows XP, flash player WIN 10,0,32,18

By: jackson

jackson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:19:26 +0000

Interesting. Would you mind posting your test environment (specs, OS, Flash player)?

By: mels

mels — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:13:01 +0000

FYI :
XML Class Time: 564
String Class Time: 3
XML Class from String Time: 13
(var $xml:XML = new XML (studentsString);)

By: jackson

jackson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:33:44 +0000

I thought of converting the string to XML and the XML to string, but decided to keep the test pure. After all, sometimes you want the string and sometimes you want the XML, so there is no universal goal that both approaches should go toward. But you showed some interest so I tried it out. It didn’t make any significant difference in either time. I’m still seeing the exact same numbers as I listed in the article. Still, it’s good to know that these conversions are fast!

By: Jonnie

Jonnie — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:26:07 +0000

I’d be curious to see what the result is for the String route if you parse it to XML at the end: var $xml:XML = new XML (studentsString);

By: jackson

jackson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:24:13 +0000

I cleaned up your posts (I don’t know how to put XML in comments either, but I’ll look into it) and tried out your version on the Windows environment I added to the article. The difference seemed negligible: 225-235ms compared to 229. Still, it’s a lot cleaner way of doing it, especially for this simple example.

Thanks for the tip!