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Rails XML Parsing (Rails Performance Series)

In part 3 of my Ruby on Rails Performance Series we’ll look at how to improve the parsing speed of XML content.

Rails will automatically parse XML in two key places:

1. When XML content is sent to a controller/action pair via POST or PUT. (Your app is an API server.)
2. When XML content is received from an ActiveResource request. (Your app is an API client.)

The default XML parser is REXML. It’s written in pure Ruby which makes it very portable. And slow. Very slow.

So, we need to replace REXML with something faster. The key is the 1libxml-ruby gem which is just a binding to the very fast libxml2 C library.

libxml-ruby has a different set of methods from REXML and is not drop in compatible. If you’re planning on moving your own REXML parsing code to libxml-ruby, it will take some work. However, it’s worth it. In one particular project, I had about a 100x speed improvement!

Rails, as it often does, makes the switch to libxml-ruby super easy. First, install the gem (requires a functioning compiler, the libxml2 library, and headers for libxml2):

1gem install libxml-ruby

Then, just add a new file to 1config/initializers/. Let’s call it 1config/initializers/xml_config.rb. In that file, put this:

1ActiveSupport::XmlMini.backend = 'LibXML'

This was only added in recent versions of Rails, I believe in 2.3.

Restart your Rails app server(s) and off you go!

tags: activeresource, performance, xml, ruby, rails