Its true!

I tried parsing a 15MB, proper XML file with nearly 20 sub nodes for a parent node.

Being newbie to Ruby, I came across the default option of REXML. I instrumented the code using the Ruby benchmark API.

A Single simple XPath query for one node to traverse thro’ the entire XML file using REXML takes 2043 seconds.

The same using LibXML takes 2 seconds.,

This shows the power of a native C library and a wrapper!