Question

I am planning to use boost property tree for our application http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_41_0/doc/html/property_tree.html. Now I wonder, everytime we call this method pt.get(“debug.level”, 0); does it read the whole file again or the value is served form internal cache. Is there any performance evaluation result of this library? Does it read the whole file in memory and serves the data from there? Anybody can share their experience using this library?

Answer 1

The library works well. You load the file into memory, operate on the property tree (query, update, whatever), and then write it out again when you finish.

We have used it for some JSON files large enough to run out of address space when loading them on a 32 bit machine using a boost::property_tree with std::string. Replacing std::string with a caching string class worked fine.

For most applications where you’re really just looking at configuration files it will be fine.