Linq performance for xml

Question

I heard that LINQ to XML has some performance issues, and some of my friends recommended that I not use it in my application. I couldn’t find anything relevant on MSDN, and I don’t want to rely on “some internet blog”. Does anyone know the official point of view on this issue or some reliable source?

Answer 1

Using LINQ to XML will read the entire file in memory.

If you are reading a huge XML file (hundreds of megabytes), this is a problem.
Instead, you can use a raw XmlReader, which provides only an XML file view only forward and will not read the entire file at once.

If you are dealing with normal sized XML files, LINQ to XML will be fine.

LINQ to XML is several orders of magnitude easier to use than XmlReader.
You should only use XmlReader if you know that you are dealing with 200MB XML files or if you measured your performance and proved that the XDocument constructor is too slow.

Answer 2

Check MSDN: Performance (LINQ to XML) and LINQ to XML Performance by Eric White - Microsoft

Answer 3

Just google linq vs xmlreader you will have this.

The top result of http://www.nearinfinity.com/blogs/joe_ferner/performance_linq_to_sql_vs.html leads to the conclusion that it compares slower with xmlreader (of course, since linq2Xml is built on top of xmlreader), but IMHO is much better than acceptable, since you Get flexibility and easier to read / code.