A while ago I had done a similar benchmark comparing (older versions of) XML::Bare (v0.11) and XML::LibXML (can't remember the version — whatever was current in summer 2007), because I had been looking for a parser for tiny, simple-structured XML that would be similarly fast as XML::LibXML, but easier to install/distribute. And XML::Bare explicitly did claim to be very fast.

The results at the time were that XML::Bare was in fact more than twice as fast as XML::LibXML.  So I was interested in how they would compare these days.  Here are the results: 

info: Parsing with XML::Bare 0.43 appears successful
info: Parsing with XML::LibXML 1.69 appears successful

             Rate   XML::Bare XML::LibXML
XML::Bare   655/s          --        -31%
XML::LibXML 953/s         45%          --

[download]

In other words, either XML::LibXML has gotten significantly faster since then, or XML::Bare slower...

(It might be worth noting that - without a clear idea of what data to extract - this is kind of comparing apples and oranges, as XML::Bare creates a 'ready-to-use' Perl data structure similar to XML::Simple, while the doc object returned by XML::LibXML would need to be traversed using a variety of dedicated method calls. Similarly, both modules are hard to compare in that XML::LibXML is definitely a lot richer in features.)

For the record, here's the modified find_parsers() routine I used (otherwise I left ikegami's code as is): 

sub find_parsers {
   my @parsers;

   if (!load_module('XML::Bare')) {
      warn("warn: XML::Bare not available\n");
   } else {
      push @parsers, [
         'XML::Bare',
         get_parser_desc_name('XML::Bare'),
         sub { XML::Bare->new(text => $xml)->parse() }
      ];
   }

   if (!load_module('XML::LibXML')) {
      warn("warn: XML::LibXML not available\n");
   } else {
      push @parsers, [
         'XML::LibXML',
         get_parser_desc_name('XML::LibXML'),
         sub { XML::LibXML->new()->parse_string($xml) }
      ];
   }
   return \@parsers;
}

[download]

(the XML::Bare object needs to be recreated for every parse, so to be fair I did same on the XML::LibXML side — which doesn't make a huge difference for XML::LibXML, btw, just 3%)

As XML input for the above results I used the book.xml file (23K, simple structure) from this collection of sample files.  This doesn't seem to be crucial, though, as tests with other input did show a similar trend.

In reply to Re: Benchmarks of XML Parsers by almut
in thread Benchmarks of XML Parsers by ikegami

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