Today I learned just how big a difference in speed there can be between a "native" parser, and a parser that uses expat. Holy Hell, there is a *huge* difference.
Of course, this means installing expat everywhere if we decide to use it, and that could be problematic in some cases.
By native do you mean XML::SAX::PurePerl or something homegrown? Certainly, any pure Perl parser will be a *lot* slower, but if you use XML::SAX::ParserFactory you don't need to install expat (or libxml, which can sometimes be faster) on all boxen, only where/when you need performance.
