How does the character encoding of the XML document affect the parsing performance?
The .NET Compact Framework implements decoders for UTF8, ASCII and UTF16 (big- and little- endian) encodings in managed code. All other encodings, such as all ANSI codepage encodings involve a PInvoke down to the operating system. So using UTF8, ACII and UTF16 is usually faster. If you don’t use international characters (outside of the ASCII character set) use UTF8 or ASCII (these have approximately equal performance). Try to avoid using Windows codepage encodings. If your content includes some non-ASCII characters, but most of it is ASCII, use UTF8 if the size of the resulting data is an important factor, such as for example for serialization or sending content across the network. Otherwise experiment and measure on case-by-case basis and choose the optimal encoding for the task. For example, UTF-16 may take more space, but there is virtually no decoding work involved.
