Choosing the Parser

Xerces versus Crimson Benchmark performed for SAX, DOM and SAXDOMIX

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Crimson offers better SAX performance while Xerces builds the large DOM trees faster and consumes less memory for them.

When using both SAX and DOM APIs you could use Crimson if the DOM trees are small and you should consider using Xerces when the building of the DOM trees is a heavy task.

In our benchmark, Crimson was faster than Xerces during the mixed SAX-DOM parsing. This could mean that Crimson has no problems building the small DOM sub-trees. However, Crimson is not a good choice when the DOM sub-trees are large.

Surprisingly, Xerces builds DOM trees two times faster than Crimson. It also needs less memory, despite its rich set of features.

Crimson is very fast at DTD-based validation.

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