XML builder performance

ruby-talk
1

Hi all,

I have been doing some performance testing, and have noticed it takes
significantly longer to render a XML output then a HTML one. It made me
think perhaps there's a faster way of generating XML than using XML
builder.

I did a quick search and did not find any alternatives, or anyone
talking about XML builder's performance issues.

Is there anyway of optimizing XML Builder? Or is there a faster
alternative?

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

2

The only Ruby Library I've found in the last 2 weeks that seems to do XMl output is: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/ruby_xml_xslt.htm

However the builder API is nice and for me personally worth the slightly longer output. However saying that I managed to output 100 records to XML within 10 seconds and I don't think it's builder slowing things down.

Cheers,
Dan

···

-----Original Message-----
From: crazygecko@gmail.com [mailto:crazygecko@gmail.com]
Sent: 31 October 2008 13:01
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: XML builder performance

Hi all,

I have been doing some performance testing, and have noticed it takes
significantly longer to render a XML output then a HTML one. It made me
think perhaps there's a faster way of generating XML than using XML
builder.

I did a quick search and did not find any alternatives, or anyone
talking about XML builder's performance issues.

Is there anyway of optimizing XML Builder? Or is there a faster
alternative?
--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

3

The standard answer for XML performance issues in Ruby is to switch to
libxml-ruby.

···

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Xin Zheng <crazygecko@gmail.com> wrote:

I have been doing some performance testing, and have noticed it takes
significantly longer to render a XML output then a HTML one. It made me
think perhaps there's a faster way of generating XML than using XML
builder.

--
Avdi

Home: http://avdi.org
Developer Blog: Avdi Grimm, Code Cleric
Twitter: http://twitter.com/avdi
Journal: http://avdi.livejournal.com

4

try tagz

# gem install tagz

require 'tagz'

xml = Tagz{ foo_{ bar_(:key => :value){ 42 } } }

http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/tagz/tagz-4.4.0/README

a @ http://codeforpeople.com/

···

On Oct 31, 2008, at 7:01 AM, Xin Zheng wrote:

Hi all,

I have been doing some performance testing, and have noticed it takes
significantly longer to render a XML output then a HTML one. It made me
think perhaps there's a faster way of generating XML than using XML
builder.

I did a quick search and did not find any alternatives, or anyone
talking about XML builder's performance issues.

Is there anyway of optimizing XML Builder? Or is there a faster
alternative?

--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama

5

I remember looking at this a while back and it turns out that a significant bottleneck is how builder escapes your text (look in the builder source for to_xs). It's doing a lot more that it has too (although I don't deny that a lot of the time that will be useful). There's a gem (fast_xs) which implements that in C and makes that bottleneck a lot faster.

Fred

···

On 31 Oct 2008, at 13:01, Xin Zheng wrote:

Hi all,

I have been doing some performance testing, and have noticed it takes
significantly longer to render a XML output then a HTML one. It made me
think perhaps there's a faster way of generating XML than using XML
builder.

I did a quick search and did not find any alternatives, or anyone
talking about XML builder's performance issues.

Is there anyway of optimizing XML Builder? Or is there a faster
alternative?

6

How large are the documents you're trying to build? If they are small,
I recommend faster-builder:

  GitHub - codahale/faster-builder: [ABANDONED] A drop-in replacement for Builder::XmlMarkup which uses libxml for speed and security.

Unfortunately its speed diminshes a lot as the number of nodes increase.
If the documents are large, you should try Nokogiri's builder. I found
it to be faster for larger documents than faster-builder.

Here is my benchmark: gist:14196 · GitHub

Here is some example builder code:

  GitHub: Let’s build from here · GitHub

···

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 10:01:14PM +0900, Xin Zheng wrote:

Hi all,

I have been doing some performance testing, and have noticed it takes
significantly longer to render a XML output then a HTML one. It made me
think perhaps there's a faster way of generating XML than using XML
builder.

I did a quick search and did not find any alternatives, or anyone
talking about XML builder's performance issues.

Is there anyway of optimizing XML Builder? Or is there a faster
alternative?

--
Aaron Patterson
http://tenderlovemaking.com/

7

Dan Webb wrote:

The only Ruby Library I've found in the last 2 weeks that seems to do
XMl output is: Ruby - XML, XSLT and XPath Tutorial

However the builder API is nice and for me personally worth the slightly
longer output. However saying that I managed to output 100 records to
XML within 10 seconds and I don't think it's builder slowing things
down.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm using it to output KML on the fly, so every half a second counts. At
the moment, it's taking .5 seconds longer to generate a small-ish file
than it takes for the HTML output.

If there are no clear drop-in alternatives, I might leave off optimising
my KML outputs.

Thanks,
Xin

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

8

The standard answer for XML performance issues in Ruby is to switch to
libxml-ruby.

Isn't libxml-ruby is used for parsing XML? Where as I only need to
output XML.

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

9

You can build and output XML with it. See for instance the Node documentation:

http://libxml.rubyforge.org/rdoc/classes/LibXML/XML/Node.html

···

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Xin Zheng <crazygecko@gmail.com> wrote:

Isn't libxml-ruby is used for parsing XML? Where as I only need to
output XML.

--
Avdi

Home: http://avdi.org
Developer Blog: Avdi Grimm, Code Cleric
Twitter: http://twitter.com/avdi
Journal: http://avdi.livejournal.com

10

Have you tried some stupid simple solution like just building the string manually?

James Edward Gray II

···

On Oct 31, 2008, at 9:32 AM, Xin Zheng wrote:

The standard answer for XML performance issues in Ruby is to switch to
libxml-ruby.

Isn't libxml-ruby is used for parsing XML? Where as I only need to
output XML.

11

I agree with Avdi. LibXML will be the fastest builder-library
solution.

If you want a friendlier interface you can try Nokogiri (http://
nokogiri.rubyforge.org/) which is a wrapper for LibXML.

-- Mark.

12

Just so there is no confusion, Nokogiri wraps the libxml2 C library.
Not the LibXML ruby library. :slight_smile:

···

On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 03:39:01AM +0900, Mark Thomas wrote:

I agree with Avdi. LibXML will be the fastest builder-library
solution.

If you want a friendlier interface you can try Nokogiri (http://
nokogiri.rubyforge.org/) which is a wrapper for LibXML.

--
Aaron Patterson
http://tenderlovemaking.com/

13

I switched a template for a huge xml file from xml builder to erb and
got a threefold speed increase.

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.