Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!sumax!quick!dsinet!davidk
From: davidk@dsinet (David Karr)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.dev-environ
Subject: Speed of ASN.1 compared to XDR.
Message-ID: <589@elroy>
Date: 24 Apr 91 23:42:58 GMT
Organization: Digital Systems Intl., Inc.
Lines: 18

We have recently gone through the effort of getting the ISODE up to
see if we could use it to implement an intersystem/process messaging system
for a product we are working on.  We very much want to go OSI, but after
running benchmarks comparing a relatively simple data structure transfer using
both ASN.1 and XDR, we find the ASN.1 process running 100(!) times slower than
the XDR process.  This is unacceptable.  Our eventual throughput with ASN.1 was
barely over 2k bytes per second.  We noticed that ASN.1 is doing tons of
mallocs/frees to get it's job done, where XDR (HP-UX implementation) is
executing very few (relatively) system calls to get its job done.  Is it
possible we are missing something in our configuration that is making the
ASN.1 process so slow?  I don't know if it matters, but we are using version
6.0 of the ISODE.  I believe it is up to about 6.7f.

-- 
Digital Systems International, Inc.	David Karr
7730 177th Pl NE			dsinet!davidk
Redmond, WA   98073-0903
(206) 881-7544 ext. 547