XML DOMDocument optimization

Question

I have a 5MB XML file

I'm using the following code to get all nodeValue

$dom = new DomDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
if(!$dom->load($url))
    return;

$games = $dom->getElementsByTagName("game");
foreach($games as $game)
{
            
}

This takes 76 seconds and there are around 2000 games tag. Is there any optimization or other solution to get the data?

Answer 1

I once wrote a blog article about loading huge XML files with XMLReader - you probably can use some of it.

Using DOM or SimpleXML is no option, since both load the whole document into memory.

Answer 2

You can use DOMXpath for querying, which is way faster than the DOMDocument:: getElementsByTagName() method.

<?php
$xpath = new \DOMXpath($dom);
$games = $xpath->query("//game");

foreach ($games as $game) {
    // Code here
}

In one of my tests with a fairly large file, this approach took < 1 sec to complete the iteration of 24k elements, whereas the DOMDocument:: getElementsByTagName() method was taking ~27 min (and the time took to iterate to the next object was exponential).