All,

I have been using BaseX for a while, connecting to the TCP endpoint. I know the 
performance I typically get, and it is impressive! However, now I wanted to use 
the HTTP endpoint, and it seems the performance is at least 2 orders of 
magnitude worse!

Here is the query that I am POSTing to 
http://localhost:8984/rest/RainFnd_6.0.10.0

<query xmlns=http://basex.org/rest>
  <text>/Class[@Package='ApplicationPlatform']/@Name</text>
</query>

This simple query will generate around 1500 results from the 13GB database 
(RainFnd_6.0.10.0<http://localhost:8984/rest/RainFnd_6.0.10.0>). It takes just 
over 7 seconds to do this. If I do this in the BaseX GUI that is self 
contained, it takes around 20ms.

However, it seems that the time spent executing the query against the database 
is negligible. Please consider this query:

<query xmlns=http://basex.org/rest>
  <text>1 + 2</text>
</query>

In which there there is obviously no database access. It takes almost the same 
amount of time as the query that accesses the database. 7 seconds to calculate 
1 + 2 is too long.

If I post the 1 + 2 query to the endpoint without specifying the database on 
the URL:

http://localhost:8984/rest

it takes around 7 milliseconds, close to what I expected, certainly within 
expectations for the time spent sending the query over the wire and serializing 
etc.

This leads me to believe that a lot of the time (>7 seconds) may be spent 
opening the database each time a POST is done? Is there a way to tweak the HTTP 
server to "remember" the connection with the current database for a little 
while? This may be against the REST principles, of course. The database is 
guaranteed to be read-only in my case.

The problem is that this makes the HTTP server inappropriate for interactive 
applications. I can still use the TCP server, where I get the results I need, 
but using the HTTP would be simpler, and have less overhead in terms of code 
needed to communicate with the server.

Please let me know if there is a way to accomplish acceptable performance with 
the HTTP server.


Best Regards

Peter Villadsen
Principal Technical Program Manager
Microsoft Business Applications Group


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