Key Elements Tracing Method for Parallel XML Parsing in Multi-Core System

Abstract

Though XML is applied intensively in a lot of applications, XML parsing is not practical in many fields because of its poor performance. Parallel XML parsing on multi-core is a promising choice. Previous methods all adopt data parallel approach on XML parsing. As the semi-structured nature of XML, they were obliged to divide the data into well-formed XML chunks and then parse these chunks parallel. The division process is named as preparsing. As the preparsing is serial, it becomes the bottleneck of parallel XML parsing. Related work Simultaneous Finite Transducer (SFTXP) parallelized the preparsing stage. It maintained multiple preparser results for each equal sized chunk according to enumerated all possible parsing states. In spite of finite states for each XML, the overhead by SFTXP is tremendous, including CPU time and memory for multiple results generating and storing, respectively. In this work, we address parallel XML parsing by Key Element Parse Tracing (KEPT) method which parallelizes the preparsing and parsing at element level. It remolds the preparsing as a key element extracting process and schedules the processing of key elements in the framework of KEPT. Then parsing process is parallelized as a whole. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we implement it on libxml2 and obtain good scalability on both an 8-core Linux machine and an 8-core 24 SMT Sun machine running Solaris.