Question

This is a bit of a two part question, for working with 40mb xml files.

• What’s a reasonable size to store in memory for a program running continually in the background?
• How to find what has changed in an XML file.

So on the first read the XML is loaded into NSData, then uploaded to the server.

Now instead of uploading a 40mb XML every time it changes, I would prefer to upload a “delta” file containing only what has changed. The program would monitor the file for change, and activate when it’s been modified. From what I can see, I would need to parse an old version of the xml file and parse the modified xml file, then compare them? Is it unreasonable to store 80mb in memory like this every time the file is modified?. Now I’m assuming that this has to be done with a DOM parser because I can’t see how you could compare two files like that with a SAX parser since it only has part of the file stored?

I’m a newbie at this so any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

NSXMLParser ended up being the most useful for this