Performance on reading XML

Hello,

At the moment i have a central static Configuration class that contains all the server-specific stuff (like uploads folder, css folder, etc.)

All the items are hardcoded in here.

I want to change this so that the configuration is done inside an xml file that the Configuration class reads.

Now I wanted to ask what the best performance is for this method.

Is it to parse the whole xml file everytime a user sends a request and put the results in Configuration (this means every time a user visits a page alot of non-used parsing time it used)?

Is it to parse the xml file everytime a function inside configuration is called (this means the xml file is parsing to much)?

Or is there any other better way (caching xml file? how to do in tomcat)?

Thanks

[812 byte] By [radicjesa] at [2007-11-27 7:48:28]