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From: djw@bbn.com (David Waitzman)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.dev-environ
Subject: Re: Speed of ASN.1 compared to XDR.
Message-ID: <63966@bbn.BBN.COM>
Date: 1 May 91 00:13:13 GMT
References: <589@elroy>
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Lines: 22

davidk@dsinet (David Karr) writes:

}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?  

By its very nature, ASN.1 using BER encoding will always be slower
than XDR.  ISODE's implementation is designed for quick
experimentation and prototyping, not for speed--- so, you observed how
it is SUPPOSED to behave.  You could hand-code your ASN.1/BER
encoding/decoding routines to get much more speed.  There have been
some papers comparing ASN.1/BER, XDR, and Apollo-NCS in various
places.  Craig Partridge was an author of one of them (I don't
remember where, trying asking Craig at craig@sics.se).

BER is the only current standard way of encoding ASN.1.  Some people
are working on faster methods.  I believe that an issue of CCR (the
magazine for ACM Sigcomm) had an article about this last year.

-david