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Re: Do long element names impact performance?

• From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@talsever.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 10:46:32 -0400

Which sentence?

First: debatable; depends upon "the distinction between reading and 
evaluating" at least, but is tendentious at best.

Second: probably a fairy story, so false, but possibly a true anecdote, 
however unlikely.

Third: assumes context not shown; as a counterexample, imagine a schema 
of 65,535 separate element definitions, each with names 65,535 
characters long, and an instance document containing 256 of each 
element (plus content); replacing these names with somewhat shorter 
ones might possibly have a measurable performance impact, hmmmm?

Fourth: author of this sentence should be introduced to Mister OOM, but 
it is true that every string (and correspondingly, every character) in 
memory is fundamentally an address, so shall we politifact that one as 
true?

Amy!
On Thu, 15 Oct 2015 13:43:10 +0000, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Is the following true or false? 
> 
> 	XML developers who fail to grasp the distinction between reading and 
> evaluating 
> 	an XML instance document may have a good model of the structure of XML, 
> 	but they usually have a terrible model of the efficiency of 
> processing XML. One 
> 	XML developer used only one-letter element names, because he felt 
> that it would 
> 	be faster for the computer to look up one-letter elements than a 
> multi-letter name. 
> 	While it may be true that shorter names can save a microsecond at 
> read time, this 
> 	makes no difference at all at evaluation time. Every element, 
> regardless of its name, 
> 	is just a memory location, and the time to access the location does 
> not depend on the 
> 	name of the element.
> 
> /Roger
> 
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• References:
  • Do long element names impact performance?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>