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:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1775202/how-to-stream-large-files-using-jaxb-marshaller

http://rezarahim.blogspot.co.nz/2010/05/chunking-out-big-xml-with-stax-and-jaxb.html

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