Dictionary Saving Horribly Slow!?

FROM : Austin Sarner
DATE : Sat Apr 02 08:05:01 2005

Hello all... here is my story,

    I am writing an app that manages a large amount of information 
in a hierarchical fashion.  Originally, I had used custom classes and 
implemented the NSCoding protocol methods to handle saving.  This was 
quick, simple, and produced decent enough results.  But as time has 
gone on I've been led to believe that if I used dictionaries for 
everything I could simply call -writeToFile:atomically: and have a 
nice, clean XML file as well as faster saving speeds  - so I went 
ahead and restructured everything around dictionaries.  This however, 
is not the case.  The saved database using NSCoder took up a mere 5mb 
and about 5 seconds to save, while the XML one took over a minute to 
save, and weighed in at 265.1mb.  Opening the file in TextWrangler 
ensured that it had been properly constructed... but is there 
something obvious I am missing - some simple way to drastically 
improve the speed of writing dictionaries -- or perhaps even another 
saving method that I have not explored?  NSCoder works, but there are 
applications that manage a lot more data than this and they don't 
make you wait for a while every time you quit the program.

Thanks,
Austin Sarner