Re: [boost] Serialization Library Review

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-18 11:45:13

At 10:46 PM 11/17/2002, Robert Ramey wrote:

 >I will be very curious to see timings on this.  There is no apriori 
reason
 >to know that the translation from native types <-> XDR is faster than
 >native types <-> text

I did a detailed timing study some years ago.  Binary was four times faster 
round trip than text.

The study included enough tests and profiling to identify the sources of 
the timing differences:

* The binary data averaged half the size of the text data. Thus I/O was 
twice as fast for binary. Presumably this would hold for any hardware; I 
would be suspicious of any timings that didn't show I/O of twice the data 
taking longer.

* The internal form of the data was binary, and only needed byte-order 
flipped for binary I/O. (The machine was little-endian and the portable 
binary file format was big-endian.) The text format required conversion to 
and from binary, and that was time-consuming on the particular machine. 
Thus  this portion of the results would vary according to the platform.

--Beman