Benchmarking XML Parsers

by Clark Cooper
May 05, 1999

A performance comparison of six stream-oriented XML parsers

This article compares the performance of six implementations of a single program that processes XML. Each implementation uses a different XML parser and four different languages are used: C, Java, Perl, and Python. Only a single parser is tested for Perl and Python, but two parsers each are tested for C and Java.
All of these parsers run under Linux, and all are stream-oriented. An application must provide callbacks (or their equivalent) in order to receive information back from the parser. While some of them have a validating mode, all the parsers were run as non-validating parsers. When I say that a single program was implemented six times, I mean that each implementation produces (or should produce) exactly the same output for a given input document. But as long as that constraint was met, I attempted to write each in the most efficient manner for the given language and parser.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/Benchmark/article.html