Re: [boost] Serialization Library Review

[Beman Dawes]

At 10:46 PM 11/17/2002, Robert Ramey wrote:

>I will be very curious to see timings on this. There is no apriori reason
>to know that the translation from native types <-> XDR is faster than
>native types <-> text

I did a detailed timing study some years ago. Binary was four times faster round trip than text.

The study included enough tests and profiling to identify the sources of the timing differences:

* The binary data averaged half the size of the text data. Thus I/O was twice as fast for binary. Presumably this would hold for any hardware; I would be suspicious of any timings that didn't show I/O of twice the data taking longer.

* The internal form of the data was binary, and only needed byte-order flipped for binary I/O. (The machine was little-endian and the portable binary file format was big-endian.) The text format required conversion to and from binary, and that was time-consuming on the particular machine. Thus this portion of the results would vary according to the platform.

--Beman


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