So I have 16 GB worth of XML files to process (about 700 files total), and I already have a functional PHP script to do that (With XMLReader) but it's taking forever. I was wondering if parsing in Python would be faster (Python being the only other language I'm proficient in, I'm sure something in C would be faster).
I think that both of them can rely over wrappers for fast C libraries (mostly libxml2) so there's shouldn't be too much difference in parsing per se.
You could try if there are differences caused by overhead, then it depends what are you gonna do over that XML. Parsing it for what?
Is XML parsing in PHP as fast as Python or other alternatives?