sn> My tests comparing the two methods showed no net difference. Each sn> method would slightly better the other in some tests, but in no sn> test was either better by more than 10%, if I recall.
After originally posting the question today, I did run a short series of tests (that I already had laying around) where that was all I changed. For typical SOAP stuff, by which I mean lost of relatively small XML nodes, both modes scale pretty linearly. The SAXSource stuff mostly beat the DocumentBuilder stuff, but it was consistent with your findings and was only a few percent better. One aspect of the results surprised me. Some of the test cases I ran had only a half dozen or so XML nodes in the response, but one of those was a String parameter. It's actually a CDATA block containing a non-SOAP blob of XML. The times for those test degraded much faster than linear with SAXSource. By the time I got up to a payload size of a couple megabytes, it was running 25 time slower than DocumentBuilder for the same data (that's 25 times, not 25%). I didn't have any time to look into, but I obviously suspect some pretty inefficient String handling somewhere. (The XML parser was Xerces 2.4.) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
