the os is linux. By obv reasons I mean that I have only a certain amount of ram. To cut down on it's usage for parsing xml I use XML::Twig. To parse a 50meg xml takes > 1gig memory. It's a multi tasking environment so if 100 files land at the same time it won't be long before the machine grinds to a halt. So when writing 50meg of xml I would want to do it a chunk at a time. I could roll my own but then I have to handle all the encoding and what have you. I'll have a look at SAX.