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Xerces2 is the next generation of high performance, fully compliant XML parsers in the Apache Xerces family. This new version of Xerces introduces the Xerces Native Interface (XNI), a complete framework for building parser components and configurations that is extremely modular and easy to program. The Apache Xerces2 parser is the reference implementation of XNI but other parser components, configurations, and parsers can be written using the Xerces Native Interface. For complete design and implementation documents, refer to the XNI Manual. Xerces2 is a fully conforming XML Schema 1.0 processor. A partial experimental implementation of the XML Schema 1.1 Structures and Datatypes Working Drafts (December 2009) and an experimental implementation of the XML Schema Definition Language (XSD): Component Designators (SCD) Candidate Recommendation (January 2010) are provided for evaluation. For more information, refer to the XML Schema page. Xerces2 also provides a complete implementation of the Document Object Model Level 3 Core and Load/Save W3C Recommendations and provides a complete implementation of the XML Inclusions (XInclude) W3C Recommendation. It also provides support for OASIS XML Catalogs v1.1. Xerces2 is able to parse documents written according to the XML 1.1 Recommendation, except that it does not yet provide an option to enable normalization checking as described in section 2.13 of this specification. It also handles namespaces according to the XML Namespaces 1.1 Recommendation, and will correctly serialize XML 1.1 documents if the DOM level 3 load/save APIs are in use.

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<!DOCTYPE faqs SYSTEM 'dtd/faqs.dtd'>
<faqs title='Performance FAQs'>
  <faq title='General Performance'>
    <q>General Performance</q>
    <a>
      <p>
	Don't use XML where it doesn't make sense. XML is not a panacea. 
	You will not get good performance by transferring and parsing a 
	lot of XML files. 
      </p>
      <p>Using XML is memory, CPU, and network intensive.</p>
    </a>
  </faq>
  <faq title='Parser Performance'>
    <q>Parser Performance</q>
    <a>
      <p>
	Avoid creating a new parser each time you parse; reuse parser 
	instances. A pool of reusable parser instances might be a good idea 
	if you have multiple threads parsing at the same time.
      </p>
      <p>
	The parser configuration may affect the performance of the parser.
	For example, if you are interested in evaluating the parser performance
	with DTDs you may want to use the <code>DTDConfiguration</code> 
	(<em>Note</em>: you can build Xerces with DTD-only support using 
	<em>dtdjars</em> build target).
      </p>
    </a>
  </faq>
  <faq title='Parsing Documents Performance'>
    <q>Parsing Documents Performance</q>
    <a>
      <p>
	There are a variety of things that you can do to improve the
	performance when parsing documents:
      </p>
      <ul>
	<li>
	  Convert the document to US ASCII ("US-ASCII") or Unicode 
	  ("UTF-8" or "UTF-16") before parsing. Documents written using 
	  ASCII are the fastest to parse because each character is 
	  guaranteed to be a single byte and map directly to their 
	  equivalent Unicode value. For documents that contain Unicode 
	  characters beyond the ASCII range, multiple byte sequences 
	  must be read and converted for each character. There is a 
	  performance penalty for this conversion. The UTF-16 encoding 
	  alleviates some of this penalty because each character is 
	  specified using two bytes, assuming no surrogate characters. 
	  However, using UTF-16 can roughly double the size of the 
	  original document which takes longer to parse.
	</li>
	<li>
	  Explicitly specify "US-ASCII" encoding if your document is in 
	  ASCII format. If no encoding is specified, the XML specification 
	  requires the parser to assume UTF-8 which is slower to process.
	</li>
	<li>
	  Avoid external entities and external DTDs. The extra file 
	  opens and transcoding setup is expensive.
	</li>
	<li>
	  Reduce character count; smaller documents are parsed quicker. 
	  Replace elements with attributes where it makes sense. Avoid 
	  gratuitous use of whitespace because the parser must scan past it.
	</li>
	<li>
	  Avoid using too many default attributes. Defaulting attribute
	  values slows down processing.
	</li>
      </ul>
    </a>
  </faq>
  <faq title='XML Application Performance'>
    <q>XML Application Performance</q>
    <a>
      <p>
       When writing an XML application there are a number of choices you can make that effect
       performance. Some of the things which will affect the performance of your application
       are described below.
      </p>
      <ul>
    <li><strong>Grammar Caching</strong> -- if you do need validation, consider
      using grammar caching to reduce the cost of validation by allowing the parser
      to skip grammar loading and assessment. See this <link idref="faq-grammars">FAQ</link> 
      on how to perform grammar caching with Xerces.
    </li>
	<li><strong>Validation</strong> -- if you don't need validation (and infoset augmentation) 
	  of XML documents, 
	  don't include validators (DTD or XML Schema) in the pipeline. 
	  Including the validator components in the pipeline will result in a performance 
	  hit for your application: if a validator component is present in the pipeline, 
	  Xerces will try to augment the infoset even if the validation feature is set to false.
	  If you are only interested in validating against DTDs don't include 
	  XML Schema validator in the pipeline.

	</li>
	<li> <strong>DOCTYPE</strong> -- if you don't need validation, 
	  avoid using a DOCTYPE line in your XML document. 
	  The current version of the parser will always read the DTD if the DOCTYPE line
	  is specified even when validation feature is set to false.
	</li>
	<li> <strong>Deferred DOM</strong>  --
	  by default, the DOM feature <em>defer-node-expansion</em> is true, 
	  causing DOM nodes to be expanded as the tree is traversed. 
	  The performance tests produced by <em>Denis Sosnoski</em> showed that Xerces DOM with 
	  deferred node expansion offers poor performance and large memory size 
	  for small documents (0K-10K). Thus, for best performance when using Xerces DOM 
	  with smaller documents you should disable the deferred node expansion feature.
	  For larger documents (~100K and higher) the deferred DOM offers 
	  better performance than non-deferred DOM but uses a large memory size.
	</li>
	<li><strong>SAX</strong> --
	  if memory usage using DOM is a concern, SAX should be considered;      
	  the SAX parser uses very little memory and notifies the   
	  application as parts of the document are parsed.
	</li>
      </ul>
      <p>
       For more detailed information on best practices for writing XML applications 
       you may want to read the following series of articles:
      </p>
      <ol>
        <li><jump href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-perfap1.html">Write XML documents and develop applications using the SAX and DOM APIs</jump></li>
        <li><jump href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-perfap2.html">Reuse parser instances with the Xerces2 SAX and DOM implementations</jump></li>
        <li><jump href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-perfap3.html">XNI, Xerces2 features and properties, and caching schemas</jump></li>
      </ol>
      <p>
       These three articles discuss general performance tips in addition to ones specifically pertaining to Xerces2.
      </p>
    </a>
  </faq>
</faqs>