Java – Parsing a Log File for Better Performance

Sounds like a job for Splunk

You probably don't want to re-invent the wheel here. Splunk has a free option and can provide you a lot of extra useful functionality that you will probably need further down the road.

XML is not a very good choice for a database that needs a lot of updating, because text files are not random access: you must parse the whole file every time you want to read or write a single element. You might be able to improve your code slightly, but XML isn't going to be fast.

Some other problems you may have:

• This will scale very poorly. As the size of your database increases, your code will get much, much slower.
• Concurrent updates will be a problem. Could you have two people performing actions that will update the database at the same time? If so, at best one action would fail to complete. At worst, it could leave your data in a corrupt state.

I would suggest you bite the bullet and replace it with a real database. You appear to have nicely abstracted your data access into functions, so all you have to do is rewrite those functions to access a database rather than read and write XML files.

(Also keep around the old XML functions to aid in moving the data. Once you have written the database interface, you can make a little program that will read all of your data in XML using the old functions, then write it to the database using the new functions.)