Python2.6 XML reading

Question

I want to migrate my system from Active Python 2.4 to Python 2.6.5. However I face some problem in parsing XML files. The I/O is very slow.

My sample xml file

<config><dicts><dictName>EnvDict</dictName><dictElems><key>AppServerIP</key>  <value>localhost</value><key>DBServerIP</key>   <value>localhost</value><key>DBServerName</key> <value>DB1</value></dictElems></dicts></config>

My log shows this xml parsing took 25s.

My system is structure as below

Publisher-Subr is used to redirect request to different modules

ClntMgrFact is attached to PubSubr and listen to pre-defined ports. It will spawn a new process for login from client.

ClntMgr(process) is spawned by ClntMgrFact and also attached to PubSubr. ClntMgr will generate a ClntWorker(thread) to process workflow.

ClntWorker need to read some static XML file from local . But the parsing is extremely slow. My XML file is around 500 - 700k.

Any one can help on this without changing the system structure? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm very perplexed...:

$ py26 -mtimeit -s'import rex' 'rex.t()'
10000 loops, best of 3: 103 usec per loop

100 microseconds seems more reasonable than 25 seconds to read in, and parse, such a small XML file as you're giving (even on the old laptop I'm using for the timing!) -- but how to explain the fact that my parsing is being 250,000 times faster than yours?!

This is rex.py , btw...:

import xml.etree.cElementTree as et

def t(fn='static.xml'):
  return et.parse(fn)

and static.xml is the file where I wrote your XML example (223 characters).

So what's your platform, OS, Python version, chosen XML parser, etc...? I'm on a macbook pro laptop, OSX 10.5.8, 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo, 667 MHz DDR2 RAM -- as I said, a pretty old machine indeed! -- with Python 2.6.4 straight from python.org.