Two days ago I was so excited! I had an idea how to make the Perl world a bit better, faster and simpler. Of course, I didn’t spread such exciting news until I checked and double-checked and benchmarked, until I’m absolutely sure I’ve found The Holy Grail.

Well, see the title. It hurts. All my benchmarks contained a terrible mistake. And those +20%, or, maybe even +100% speed boost PugiXML interface could provide doesn’t worth all the buzz I created.

I apologize.

Unfortunately, the idea contained fatal flaw. See the following post for explaantions.

Once upon a time I faced a huge pile of HTML files which I had to analyze. Say, there were about 1 000 000 of them. Say, 100 Gb of data.
Most of you would say “It’s not that much!”. And you are right. It’s not.

But then I’ve decided to estimate time required to process that pile of files. I quickly put XPaths of what I was needed together and got a prototype in Web::Scraper. And here I go: ~0.94s per file, i/o overhead not included. That occurred more than 11 days on my laptop. Phew!