[jbreiding]

I think this depends of the levels of nesting and complexity, but a libsax based parser is not "incredibly" slow.

A Dom based parser could be, but also depends of number of nodes and nesting.

[learc83]

I'm not sure why the OP thinks that parsing XML is any slower than any other data representation method that allows arbitrary nesting.

Love sax by the way. I just switched over one of our sites to use a sax based parser because the default rails .to_hash was choking on 100MB+ XML files.