2 Fast thrice Furious

Preparing to make the initial code contribution for RMF, we ran our RIF/ReqIF metamodels through several performance tests. To start with, we tested the load and save times of RIF files based on some industry samples. To get some comparison data, we generated XMI files using the same data held in RIF XML files and tested the load/save time against it. The results are quite promising.

Before we go into the details of the tests, its better to define two components involved in our test comparisons.

• The customized RIF XML loader (a.k.a RMF Loader) and serializer (a.k.a RMF Serializer) for loading/saving OMG RIF XML files into RIF Ecore metamodel (read more on the metamodel implementation here).
• The default RIF XMI loader and serializer for  loading/saving RIF XMI files into RIF Ecore model (this is not in the scope of RMF. We use this only to get some comparison).

Here are some highlights from our tests.

• A 32MB RIF XML file is loaded in 14.4 seconds by RMF loader where as the same data in XMI format is loaded by the default EMF XMI loader in 22.2 seconds (and 70 mins(!!) without any optimizations to the XMI loader)
• The average time taken to load per MB of data from RIF XML is 0.5 seconds, whereas RIF XMI takes 1.63 seconds per MB. For save, average time taken per MB of data to RIF XML is 0.09 seconds, whereas RIF XMI takes 1.22 seconds per MB
• The load and save time for RIF XML files by RMF loader/serializer increases linearly with size