Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML

Item 32. Choose SAX for Computer Efficiency

For most applications, performing the XML processing with SAX will result in by far the fastest program. It will certainly allow the program to use much less memory than the DOM or JDOM equivalent. If maximum speed or minimum size is your primary concern, choose SAX.

What makes SAX so fast and so memory efficient is that it's effectively stateless. As the parser parses, it has an extremely local view of the XML document. It really doesn't need to concern itself with anything more than the current tag, text string, comment, or processing instruction. For purposes of well-formedness checking, a SAX parser has to hold on to a stack of ancestor elements so it can verify that each end-tag matches its corresponding ...