[Python-Dev] Fixing the XML batteries (original) (raw)

Stefan Behnel stefan_ml at behnel.de
Fri Dec 16 17:00:26 CET 2011

Stefan Behnel, 14.12.2011 20:41:

It's clear from the discussion that there are still users and that new code is still being written that uses MiniDOM. However, I would argue that this cannot possibly be performance critical code and that it only deals with somewhat small documents. I say that because MiniDOM is evidently not suitable for large documents or performance critical applications, so this is the only explanation I have why the performance problems would not be obvious in the cases where it is still being used. And if they do show, it appears to be much more likely that users rewrite their code using ElementTree or lxml than that they try to fix MiniDOM's performance issues.

Out of curiosity, I reran my benchmarks under PyPy 1.7.

http://blog.behnel.de/index.php?p=210

In short: MiniDOM performs substantially better there, both in terms of time and space. That by itself doesn't make PyPy an interesting platform for XML processing (using lxml in CPython is way faster), but I found it interesting to note that the problem is not strictly inherent in MiniDOM. It also depends a lot on the runtime environment, even when it comes to memory usage.

Stefan

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