http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/324 On my work (programming, digital libraries, cataloging) and other stuff that perks my interest (family, cycling, etc) Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:56:39 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/324/comment-page-1#comment-17189 Dilettante’s Ball » The Soul-sucking vacuum that is EAD Thu, 21 Dec 2006 04:28:24 +0000 http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/324#comment-17189 [...] While poring over the REXML API docs, I noticed that the REXML::Element.each_element method’s argument was called ‘xpath’. Terry had written about how dreadfully slow XPath queries were with REXML and, as a result, I thought I was avoiding them. When I removed the path arg from the each_element call in one of my methods and just iterated through each child element to see if its name matched, it cut the processing time in half! So, while 12 seconds was certainly no thoroughbred, it was definitely the right track. When I eliminated every xpath in the recursion process, I got it down to about 5 seconds. Add a touch of fragment caching and the natural performance boost of a production vs. development site in rails, and I think we’ve got a “good enough for now” solution. [...] [...] While poring over the REXML API docs, I noticed that the REXML::Element.each_element method’s argument was called ‘xpath’. Terry had written about how dreadfully slow XPath queries were with REXML and, as a result, I thought I was avoiding them. When I removed the path arg from the each_element call in one of my methods and just iterated through each child element to see if its name matched, it cut the processing time in half! So, while 12 seconds was certainly no thoroughbred, it was definitely the right track. When I eliminated every xpath in the recursion process, I got it down to about 5 seconds. Add a touch of fragment caching and the natural performance boost of a production vs. development site in rails, and I think we’ve got a “good enough for now” solution. [...]

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