With the line commented out, the previous line (the concatenation) is used as the return value of the handler. That return value is passed around and used for who knows what. It gets very large. If you replace the commented out line with "1;", it will be even faster.

It sure is surprising until you figure out what's going on, though!

In reply to Re: XML::Parser ( or Perl internals ) speed mysticism by sfink
in thread XML::Parser ( or Perl internals ) speed mysticism by zagzag

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