elektito programming & stuff

Benchmarking Python XML Parsers

I’ve written a small benchmarking tool for some of the different XML parsers available to Python programmers. It calculates each option’s throughput by sending a large amount of XML data to each parser. You need to provide it with some XML input.

$ ./pyxmlperftests.py 1.xml 2.xml 3.xml 4.xml

You can find the source code here on Github.

These are the results on my computer:

Results:
   xml.dom.minidom: 7.49 MBps
   lxml.etree: 89.63 MBps
   xml.etree.ElementTree.iterparse: 31.77 MBps
   xml.etree.ElementTree: 58.43 MBps
   xml.sax: 25.68 MBps

As you can see, lxml rocks. Although, to be honest, I’m still looking for something faster than that!

A word of warning. I don’t claim this is in anyway a fair and scientific benchmark. I just wanted to see how these relatively compare and cooked this script to get me some numbers.