All,
I have been using BaseX for a while, connecting to the TCP endpoint. I know the performance I typically get, and it is impressive! However, now I wanted to use the HTTP endpoint, and it seems the performance is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse!
Here is the query that I am POSTing to http://localhost:8984/rest/RainFnd_6.0.10.0
<query xmlns=http://basex.org/rest> <text>/Class[@Package='ApplicationPlatform']/@Name</text> </query>
This simple query will generate around 1500 results from the 13GB database (RainFnd_6.0.10.0http://localhost:8984/rest/RainFnd_6.0.10.0). It takes just over 7 seconds to do this. If I do this in the BaseX GUI that is self contained, it takes around 20ms.
However, it seems that the time spent executing the query against the database is negligible. Please consider this query:
<query xmlns=http://basex.org/rest> <text>1 + 2</text> </query>
In which there there is obviously no database access. It takes almost the same amount of time as the query that accesses the database. 7 seconds to calculate 1 + 2 is too long.
If I post the 1 + 2 query to the endpoint without specifying the database on the URL:
it takes around 7 milliseconds, close to what I expected, certainly within expectations for the time spent sending the query over the wire and serializing etc.
This leads me to believe that a lot of the time (>7 seconds) may be spent opening the database each time a POST is done? Is there a way to tweak the HTTP server to "remember" the connection with the current database for a little while? This may be against the REST principles, of course. The database is guaranteed to be read-only in my case.
The problem is that this makes the HTTP server inappropriate for interactive applications. I can still use the TCP server, where I get the results I need, but using the HTTP would be simpler, and have less overhead in terms of code needed to communicate with the server.
Please let me know if there is a way to accomplish acceptable performance with the HTTP server.
Best Regards
Peter Villadsen Principal Technical Program Manager Microsoft Business Applications Group