Greetings, I have recently switched from REXML to libxml-ruby (0.5.2) because I really needed a major speed boost for a web application and libxml- ruby really delivered. Some parts of the code which were taking more than 30 seconds are now running under 0.2 seconds, I'll take a 150x speed boost any day ;)
HOWEVER, I also discovered that this comes at a price: libxml-ruby is *VERY* unstable and crashes very frequently under high(-ish) memory pressures. I have seen mentions in past messages about a new memory model being used, but I still get very frequent crashes. For example, I was able to track one down in 'ruby_xml_xpath_object_mark' (that's in ext/xml/ ruby_xml_xpath_object.c) where the use of 'xpop->nodesetval->nodeNr' causes the crash because 'nodesetval' is NULL. The top of the stack always looks like this: 0 libxml_so.bundle 0x002f2484 ruby_xml_xpath_object_mark + 92 1 libruby.dylib 0x00238dd8 gc_mark_children + 1628 2 libruby.dylib 0x00238744 gc_mark + 196 3 libruby.dylib 0x002383e8 mark_locations_array + 148 4 libruby.dylib 0x00239c24 garbage_collect + 340 5 libruby.dylib 0x00237f80 rb_newobj + 44 ... I don't know the libxml-ruby code well enough yet to propose a clean fix (I'm not sure that simply testing for NULL on nodesetval would be enough or appropriate), so if anyone could chime in... :) Thanks. -- Luc Heinrich _______________________________________________ libxml-devel mailing list libxml-devel@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/libxml-devel
