Is parsing JSON faster than parsing XML

Question

I\'m creating a sophisticated JavaScript library for working with my company\'s server side framework.

The server side framework encodes its data to a simple XML for

Answer 1

If possible, it would make sense to just measure it. By 'if possible' I mean that tooling for javascript (esp. for performance analysis) may not be quite as good as for stand-alone programming languages.

Why measure? Because speculation based solely on properties of data formats is not very useful for performance analysis -- developers' intuitions are notoriously poor at predicting performance. In this case it just means that it all comes down to maturity of respective XML and JSON parser (and generators) in use. XML has the benefit of having been around longer; JSON is bit simpler to process. This based on having actually written libraries for processing both. In the end, if all things are equal (maturity and performance optimization of libraries), JSON can indeed be bit faster to process. But both can be very fast; or very slow with bad implementations.

However: I suspect that you should not worry all that much about performance, like many have already suggested. Both xml and json can be parsed efficiently, and with modern browsers, probably are. Chances are that if you have performance problems it is not with reading or writing of data but something else; and first step would be actually figuring out what the actual problem is.