HTTPService performance of the various result formats

Today I was reading about the various result formats options available for using with HTTPService requests. These formats are:

• object (default) - the resulting xml is returned as an ObjectProxy, or an ArrayCollection of ObjectProxy objects
  • See my post about the ObjectProxy class and how to access the proxied object
• array - the root object is returned as the first item in an Array
• xml - returns the well formed xml (as an XMLNode object)
  
• e4x - returns the response as an XML object
• flashvars - result is formatted into name=value pairs like "name=value&on=true"
• text - returns the response as a String object

Have you ever wondered which one is the fastest?

I ran some tests on an XML file that had 22,000 lines, and here are the results:

• object: 610ms
• array: 600ms
• xml: 244ms
• flashvars: 121ms
• text: 51ms
• e4x: 113ms
  

And here is the code I used to calculate the times:

private var startTime:int; private function loadXMLFile(format:String):void {     var service:HTTPService = new HTTPService();     service.url = "huge.xml";  // located in the project src directory     service.resultFormat = format;     service.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache";  // no caching of the file     service.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache";     service.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, resultHandler);     startTime = getTimer();     var token:AsyncToken = service.send();     token.resultFormat = format; }     private function resultHandler(event:ResultEvent):void {     var time:int = getTimer() - startTime;     trace(event.token.resultFormat + ": " + time + "ms"); }

Notes: there are static constants for the 6 result formats in HTTPService.
I haven't done any calculations on how long it would take to parse the XML vs. working with the ObjectProxy objects. And obviously if you are working with other files types besides XML then the results will be different.

Out of curiosity I also tested how long it would take to load the same file using a different method using the URLLoader and URLRequest classes. The result was usually around 80ms, but that was just to return the contents of the file. When converted into an XML object it was closer to 120ms.