what's faster on iPhone? XML pList or JSON?

Question

Assuming both XML plist and JSON are delivered over http, gzipped, which one will be processed faster on an iPhone?

Answer 1

A co-worker and I did some rudimentary benchmarks recently to test which was faster for an application we were writing. We tested this JSON framework, and the NSXML parser as well as a TreeNode parser we found in an Objective-C book. Here is the note I sent to the other developers on our team:

The benchmark tested how each library handled getting the filename and path
of 100 assets, 100 times each (for a total count of 10,000 runs per library).
The results are below:

Method    Average(s)    Total(s)
TreeNode  0.307475      30.747493
NSXML     0.483778      48.377843
JSON      0.233179      23.317870 

Answer 2

JSON beats plists according to this: http://samsoff.es/posts/web-services-with-cocoa-surprise