minidom memory performance

[Geoff Gerrietts]

I was noticing today -- after some talks with a friend who tried to
use minidom on a 28MB XML file and having it run thru 8GB of main
memory on Alpha -- that when I load my own 26kB XML file into a
minidom tree, my process size grows a little more than 2MB.

By my very rough calculations, that's in the neighborhood of 10000%
memory consumption. Does this seem right to everyone? Is this just the
overhead that goes with using pure python classes to implement a
data model that's heavy on classes and light on data? Is there
something else that's going on there that I don't understand?

Thanks,
--G.

-- 
Geoff Gerrietts <geoff at gerrietts dot net>     http://www.gerrietts.net/
 "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the 
          systematic organization of hatreds." --Henry Adams