Robert Ramey writes:

Given your interest in this topic, you might want to take a look at

boost/libs/serialization/performance.

included with the boost 1.38 package.

There is a Jamfile.v2 in that directory and everything is set up just the way boost testing is.  The only difference is that, using the GCC compiler, a function by function time table is generated which pinpoints where time is being consumed. This would help answer such questions as "what if I replaced std::string with something else".

I only included a couple of performance tests to demonstrate the system. I havn't had time to make a more complete set of tests.  Ideally, I would like to see your tests included for comparison.

The source code on webEbenezer.net is not copyright protected, so anyone interested in doing what you suggest is welcome to do so. I doubt I'm going to be able to do that anytime soon.

My question has always been that since serialization (in at least the simpler cases) just boils down to writing out the data, whether the code is generated by one template or another shouldn't make a big difference.  That is, at the end of the day, the sequence of operations should be pretty much the same whether one is hand rolling the code or whether it is generated by templates.

It may have something to do with your use of iostreams. I don't think that accounts for all of the difference, but my guess is it's a big part of it. In my opinion using insert with a hint is an easy way to improve the performance of the Boost Serialization library when loading instances of (multi)set, multi(map) and rb_tree. To my knowledge the only draw back with that is if someone is serializing from say a list<int> to a set<int> and the data in the list is not ordered. In that case using a hint would impede performance. Since that situation does not come up a lot, I think using hinted inserts as a default makes sense. We plan to change (this month) from a default of "regular" insert functions to hinted inserts for the types mentioned here. Currently we have a @hi option to turn on hinted inserts. That will change to @nohi to turn them off and could be used if data from a non-ordered list<int> is being sent to a set<int>. Brian Wood Ebenezer Enterprises www.webEbenezer.net "Then Samuel took a rock and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer [Rock of Help] and said, 'Until now the LORD has helped us.'"