I always so like the breath of fresh air Uche brings to most topics. His benchmark examples are nicely down to earth (I would point out that I always do almost exactly the same thing--including full code--when I benchmark tools in my articles).

Anyway, with no real a priori sense of how it would come out, I decided to try gnosis.xml.objectify in the mix. I like my API best and all :-).

First, the script used:

$ cat time_xo.py 

from gnosis.xml.objectify import make_instance, walk_xo, tagname

ot = make_instance('ot/ot.xml')

for node in walk_xo(ot):

    if tagname(node) == 'v' and 'begat' in node.PCDATA:

        print node.PCDATA

I don't use the gnosis.xml.objectify.utils.XPath() function here, though I could. That's because I don't really believe XPath is entirely Pythonic

The timings are quite consistent between five runs:

$ time python2.3 time_xo.py > verses


real    0m7.200s

user    0m5.790s

sys     0m0.350s

Oh... I run on a quite different architecture than Uche, but the Pystone on my Powerbook is just about the same as Uche's:

$ uname -a

Darwin gnosis-powerbook.local 7.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.7.0: Sun Nov  7 16:06:51 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.9.5.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC  Power Macintosh powerpc

$ python /sw/lib/python2.3/test/pystone.py

Pystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 3.04

This machine benchmarks at 16447.4 pystones/second