StreamMessages and MapMessages consist of individual items (or chunks) of data. The larger the items are, the better the performance is. For example, a group of database records can be sent in a StreamMessage with each field as a separate item (using a write... method). Much better performance is achieved if each record is converted to RAW data and written as a Byte item in a StreamMessage using writeBytesFromRaw(). Applications can use multiple appendText methods to generate larger messages in a TextMessage and XMLMessage. Using larger segments in each appendText improves performance.