23 January 2014

How to reduce memory usage when marshalling large KML files with JAK (the Java API for KML)

This is something I discovered a while ago and never got around to publish it on this blog.

for a while I've been experiencing memory issues when marshalling large files.
I've monitored this usage with some crude profiling:
25,000 locations: 72MB
50,000 locations: 140MB

So I've looked for ways to reduce this problem. One approach is to marshal the file in chunks instead of all at once. Here are some useful links:


Example:

JAXBContext context = JAXBContext.newInstance(type);
Marshaller m = context.createMarshaller();
m.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FRAGMENT, Boolean.TRUE);
    java.io.StringWriter sw = new java.io.StringWriter();
    XMLStreamWriter xmlOut = XMLOutputFactory.newFactory().createXMLStreamWriter(sw);
  
    xmlOut.writeStartDocument("UTF-8", "1.0");
    xmlOut.writeStartElement("kml");
    xmlOut.writeDefaultNamespace("http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2");

    xmlOut.writeNamespace("atom", "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom");
    xmlOut.writeNamespace("kml", "http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2");
    xmlOut.writeNamespace("gx", "http://www.google.com/kml/ext/2.2");
    xmlOut.writeNamespace("xal", "urn:oasis:names:tc:ciq:xsdschema:xAL:2.0");
        
    xmlOut.writeStartElement("Document");

  // iterate through your placemarks here
    Placemark placemark = new Placemark()
   ...
    m.marshal(placemark, xmlOut);
 
     xmlOut.writeEndElement(); // Document
     xmlOut.writeEndElement(); // kml
     xmlOut.close();
    

This is an intermediate solution that sacrifices elegance but this way I've been able to reduce memory usage at least by 60%:

25,000 locations: 20MB
50,000 locations: 40MB

I believe a similar approach can be used when parsing large documents.
I hope someone finds this useful

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