Alternatives to my slow method of using BeautifulSoup and Python to parse Amazon API XML?

Question

As the title says, I'm using the BS module in Python to parse XML pages that I access from the Amazon API (i create the signed url, load it with liburl2, and then parse with BS).

It takes about 4 seconds to do two pages, but there has to be a faster way

Would PHP be faster? What's making it slow, the BS parsing or the liburl loading?

Answer 1

If you want to find out what's making it slow, use one of the profilers. I suspect it's the network access (and their underlying database retrieval) that's slower than the rest.