It's rather unlikely you're doing anything wrong. IIRC, BeautifulSoup docs acknowledge that it is rather slow. Also, if you don't make use of the methods that

It's rather unlikely you're doing anything wrong. IIRC, BeautifulSoup docs acknowledge that it is rather slow. Also, if you don't make use of the methods that extract/unravel object trees, they may not be properly GC'd, leading to further slowdowns. I can't remember the method names exactly (might be destroy() and extract()), but they're in the docs.