*sigh* -- I kinda wish this whole discussion got captured in http://libraries.stackexchange.com/ ...
Peter On Jun 8, 2012, at 2:36 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote: > I'm working on a script that needs to be able to crosswalk at least a > couple hundred XML files regularly, some of which are quite large. > > I've thought of a number of ways to go about this, but I wanted to bounce > this off the list since I'm sure people here deal with this problem all the > time. My goal is to make something that's easy to read/maintain without > pegging the CPU and consuming too much memory. > > The performance and load I'm seeing from running the files through LibXML > and SimpleXML on the large files is completely unacceptable. SAX is not out > of the question, but I'm trying to avoid it if possible to keep the code > more compact and easier to read. > > I'm tempted to streamedit out all line breaks since they occur in > unpredictable places and put new ones at the end of each record into a temp > file. Then I can read the temp file one line at a time and process using > SimpleXML. That way, there's no need to load giant files into memory, > create huge arrays, etc and the code would be easy enough for a 6th grader > to follow. My proposed method doesn't sound very efficient to me, but it > should consume predictable resources which don't increase with file size. > > How do you guys deal with large XML files? Thanks, > > kyle > > <rant>Why the heck does the XML spec require a root element, > particularly since large files usually consist of a large number of > records/documents? This makes it absolutely impossible to process a file of > any size without resorting to SAX or string parsing -- which takes away > many of the advantages you'd normally have with an XML structure. </rant> -- Peter Murray Assistant Director, Technology Services Development LYRASIS peter.mur...@lyrasis.org +1 678-235-2955 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 800.999.8558 Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org LYRASIS: Great Libraries. Strong Communities. Innovative Answers.
