Improving the performance of XML based technologies by caching and reusing information

The growing synergy between Web services and grid-based technologies is enabling profound, dynamic interactions between applications dispersed in geographic, institutional, and conceptual space. Such deep interoperability requires the simplicity, robustness, and extensibility for which XML has been conceived, making it a natural lingua franca for the network. Along with these advantages, there is a degree of inefficiency that may limit the applicability of XML. Firstly, we investigate the limitations of XML for high-performance and high-interactive distributed computing. Our experimental results clearly show that focusing on parsers, that are routinely used to desterilize XML messages exchanged in these system, we can improve the performance of a generic end to end Web services based solution. Secondly we present a new parser, the cache parser, which uses a cache to reduce the parsing time sender and receiver side, by reusing information related to previously parsed documents/messages similar to the one under examination. Finally, we show how our fast parser can improve the global throughput of any application based on Web or grid services, or also JAXP-RPC. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is 25 times faster than the fastest algorithm in the market and, if used in a WS scenario, can dramatically increase the number of requests per second handled by a server (up to 150% of improvement) bringing it close to a system that does not use XML at all