XML

So I used xml.dom.minidom.parse on a 18MB XML file. The damn thing ate 900MB of RAM. I sort of expected this kind of disaster, but 50 fucking times more memory?

Now, I know jack shit about the in-memory representation this thing uses, but holy fucking shit, you could have an individual struct with 10 pointers for each character and it'd still be smaller (this is on 32 bit btw).

Try another parser from the hundreds floating around the internet? Make your own? Or just give up and just let it use the RAM, it's not like you need it for anything, right?