title: StringBuilder vs XmlTextWriter
body: <p>I am trying to squeeze as much performance as i can from a custom HttpHandler that serves Xml content.</p>
  
  <p>I' m wondering which is better for performance.  Using the XmlTextWriter class or ad-hoc StringBuilder operations like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?&gt;");    
  sb.AppendFormat("&lt;element&gt;{0}&lt;/element&gt;", SOMEVALUE);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Does anyone have first hand experience?</p>