In my experience if you are using XML as a data interchange format and it's slow it's probably because you are using a DOM parser instead of a SAX parser. DOM p

In my experience if you are using XML as a data interchange format and it's slow it's probably because you are using a DOM parser instead of a SAX parser. DOM parsers build a tree that is best used describing a marked up document and much less useful for describing a data structure you might want to serialize or deserialize. I've gotten incredible speedups just by switching to SAX parsing in those cases.