Benchmark Tool by Intel

I found a product on the web called the XML Benchmark Tool (XBT) by Intel. It is an XML performance and measurement tool. It analyzes the performance of XML processing engines. It tests a number of things such as XML parsing, XLST, XML Schema validation, and XPath operations to name a few. You can write your own driver since the tool is provided as a framework. There are versions for Windows and Linux. You can test C++ and Java code.

The XBT is provided for free. I suspect Intel is trying to gather good will to sell its XML Software Suite. This product costs $199 for the developer edition. The run time license goes for $1999. It states that it can handle large XML file processing. It claims to be standards compliant. The product also states that it is thread safe.

I downloaded the free XBT. It was almost 6 Megabytes. The download unzips into a directory structure. There is no install program. I found that a bit strange. You have to manually configure the product yourself. It requires you to obtain and install third party products such as Cygwin, the JDK, and Visual Studio. The free downloads comes with a PDF user guide. There were too many dependencies and configurations required to get the application up and quickly running.

XBT comes with many familiar drivers. For example it comes with Xerces, JAXP, libxml, MSXML, JDOM, Saxxon, and Xalan. This seemed promising. When I signed up to download the free product, I had to provide my e-mail address. It was embarrassing on September 4th when I received the following e-mail from a guy at Intel:

From: censored@intel.com
Date: Sep 4, 2008 9:39 PM
Subject: Out of Office: XML Benchmark Tool
To: me

I will be on vacation with no email access, returning Sept 2nd. Please contact for any items needing my immediate attention.

Ouch. Somebody has fallen asleep at Intel product support. I was not even given the e-mail address of the other guy at Intel. I suspect this out of office message was intended for other Intel Corporation employees. The dude forget that he was the one who received automatic e-mails every time somebody downloaded the XML Benchmark Tool. LOL.