Fastest data serialization language for php

I'm working on a pretty large project right now and will need to send a large amount of data to a php script to be parsed and entered into a database. The data will be generated by a java applet (not javascript, java - just to be clear). There will be somewhere around 800 - 1000 points of information being passed from the java applet to the php script about once every 5 minutes. The applet will be deployed among a large amount of locations.

Both the amount of applets deployed as well as the list of points of information to be sent by each applet are expected to increase as the project matures. Needless to say, this needs to be extremely efficient in both the bandwidth necessary to send the information to the php script, as well as be incredibly easy for php to parse in a timely fashion.

I'd like to know if any of you have any knowledge on the efficiency of php to parse xml vs json vs yaml vs anything else that I've failed to list here. Which data-interchange format is the fastest. As far as human-readability, I can work around it until the server infrastructure is more substantial. For now though, I need to simply know which exchange format is the most reliable in parsing efficiency.

seams like you have a large database, i have been learning about oracle databases and could be something worth looking into as it is built for large scale.

if server load is too much may need to look into a server just for converting SQL data depending of the requests/s.

but yea as for parsing the info it is out of my skill.

Good luck with the project.

Without digging into any actual numbers, XML seems like a poor choice just because of the overhead it adds to your data. Tags take up precious bandwidth. JSON seems like a better choice; it's easy to parse (regardless of language) and is easier to read in my opinion.

Cool, thanks guys!