XML (.NET 1.1) Performance Guidelines

- J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, and Alex Mackman

Design Considerations

• Choose the appropriate XML class for the job.
• Consider validating large documents.
• Process large documents in chunks if possible.
• Use streaming interfaces.
• Consider hard-coded transformations.
• Consider element and attribute name lengths.
• Consider sharing the XmlNameTable.

Parsing XML

• Use XmlTextReader to parse large XML documents.
• Use XmlValidatingReader for validation.
• Consider combining XmlReader and XmlDocument.
• On the XmlReader use the MoveToContent and Skip methods to skip unwanted items.

Validating XML

• Use XmlValidatingReader.
• Do not validate the same document more than once.
• Consider caching the schema.

Writing XML

• Use XmlTextWriter

XSLT Processing

• Use XPathDocument for faster XSLT transformations.
• Consider caching compiled style sheets.
• Split complex transformations into several stages.
• Minimize the size of the output document.
• Write efficient XSLT.

XPath Queries

• Use XPathDocument to process XPath statements.
• Avoid the // operator by reducing the search scope.
• Compile both dynamic and static XPath expressions.