On his blog today, David Sklar has this new post that compares the speed of two methods of grabbing info from an XML document in PHP5 - DOM traversal versus XPath.

Needing to pick out some bits from a smallish (40 lines) XML document studded with namespaces, I first turned to DomXPath. Worked great, code's concise, XPath expression is simple. But I had the nagging thought that using DOM traversal functions should be faster.

The results from his test? The DOM traversal is about four times faster than using XPath to achieve the same thing.

That 4x speed multiple translates into about a half second to execute for the XPath code and about 0.13 seconds to execute for the DOM code when each is run 10,000 times. Since a typical use of this code will involve it running maybe 10 or 20 times during a request, I'm happy to sacrifice a few microseconds of processor time in exchange for simpler code.