I've been having the same problem. I originally used xpath expressions to parse values, but find & findvalue seems to be extremely slow.

Something like this:

    foreach my $query ($xc->findnodes('/xn:query/xn:sequence/xn:transa
+ction/xn:step/xn:loginTranHistory'))
    {
        my $share = xc->findvalue('./xn:shareSerial',$query);
            my $cat     = $xc->findvalue('./xn:category',$query)||'';
            my $catop     = $xc->findvalue('./xn:category/@option',$qu
+ery)||'';
# several more findvalues ...
}
[download]

Works fine for a 100 records or so, but once I scaled up to a 1000 records or so, it was taking 40-60 seconds to pull the records. Profiling was showing 80-90% of the time was taken up in the find.

So now I'm converting everything to getChildrenByTagName. That alone made the program run 75% faster, but I'm having trouble getting the attributes.

I'll look at looping through the Nodelist object and calling attributes(), but I thought I'd share my problems with find to see if anyone has any ideas why it would run so slow.