Ruby XML Performance Shootout: Nokogiri vs LibXML vs Hpricot vs REXML

Thinking about parsing xml /w #ruby? Read this before It's NO fun parsing a 22MB Nessus file with rexml #handsburned

Disclaimer: Every time we've run a piece about benchmarking or performance numbers on Ruby Inside, a retraction or significant correction has come out shortly thereafter. Benchmarking is hard, ugly, and quite often wrong or biased. It is not useless, however, but if you depend on the results in any way, you should certainly try to do your own benchmarking to confirm. Last week, libxml-ruby 1 was released - a significant achievement since it had been under development for seven years. I suspected that it might just pip Nokogiri to the "fastest way to parse XML in Ruby" post and invited people to benchmark them. Turns out.. it ain't so. Nokogiri is the fastest. Aaron Peterson , the developer behind Nokogiri, decided to run some tests and he's published the results in a dossier called xml_truth. The benchmarking environment was Ruby 1.8.6 on OS X 10.5 with libxml2 2.7.3 insta...

Full article: http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-xml-performance-benchmarks...