English

An Analysis of XML Compression Efficiency

Databases 2024-10-11 v1 Information Theory Performance math.IT

Abstract

XML simplifies data exchange among heterogeneous computers, but it is notoriously verbose and has spawned the development of many XML-specific compressors and binary formats. We present an XML test corpus and a combined efficiency metric integrating compression ratio and execution speed. We use this corpus and linear regression to assess 14 general-purpose and XML-specific compressors relative to the proposed metric. We also identify key factors when selecting a compressor. Our results show XMill or WBXML may be useful in some instances, but a general-purpose compressor is often the best choice.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.07603,
  title  = {An Analysis of XML Compression Efficiency},
  author = {Christopher James Augeri and Barry E. Mullins and Leemon C. Baird and Dursun A. Bulutoglu and Rusty O. Baldwin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.07603},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

1. test data at https://web.archive.org/web/20160805043420/http://chris-augeri.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/xml_compress.htm 2. one next step is testing newer compressors, e.g., Brotli, along with Zstandard, which leverages the asymmetric numeral system (ANS) 3. citations at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=8178011010886368797&hl=en&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:15:37.083Z