Hello, grizzley.

I have little experience for huge XML files, so I take ready made 100MB xml sample file for example.

Does your colleague have free memory while his process? XML::Twig will eat up memory for large XML files without "purge" or "flush".

Bellow is my test script, counting text tag in two ways.

use strict; use warnings; use XML::Twig;
use Time::HiRes;

my $cnt1=0;
my $b1=Time::HiRes::time();
XML::Twig->new(
    twig_roots => {
        'text' => sub{ $cnt1++; $_[0]->purge;}, 
    },
)->parsefile("standard");
my $e1=Time::HiRes::time();

my $cnt2=0;
my $b2=Time::HiRes::time();
XML::Twig->new(
    twig_roots =>{
        '/site/regions/africa//text' => sub{$cnt2++;},
    },
)->parsefile("standard");
my $e2=Time::HiRes::time();

print "1. text count=$cnt1, time=".($e1-$b1)."\n";
print "2. text count=$cnt2, time=".($e2-$b2)."\n";



__DATA__
1. text count=105114, time=111.188741922379
2. text count=1657, time=60.9104990959167
[download]

When I forget to purge(), first example eated up my memory and coredumped. Sometimes, purge() needs some care because it purges inner most element (XML Newbie 's example of Twig has some relation to it).

And if you can squeeze the range with xpath like expression, it could become faster.

I agree with other monks opinions ...
regards.

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