"Out of memory" while parsing large (100 Mb) XML file using perl

Question

I have an error "Out of memory" while parsing large (100 Mb) XML file

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Twig;

my $twig=XML::Twig->new();
my $data = XML::Twig->new
             ->parsefile("divisionhouserooms-v3.xml")
               ->simplify( keyattr => []);

my @good_division_numbers = qw( 30 31 32 35 38 );

foreach my $property ( @{ $data->{DivisionHouseRoom}}) {

    my $house_code = $property->{HouseCode};
    print $house_code, "\n";

    my $amount_of_bedrooms = 0;

    foreach my $division ( @{ $property->{Divisions}->{Division} } ) {

        next unless grep { $_ eq $division->{DivisionNumber} } @good_division_numbers;
        $amount_of_bedrooms += $division->{DivisionQuantity};
    }

    open my $fh, ">>", "Result.csv" or die $!;
    print $fh join("\t", $house_code, $amount_of_bedrooms), "\n";
    close $fh;
}

What i can do to fix this error issue?

Answer 1

Handling large XML files that don't fit in memory is something that XML::Twig advertises:

One of the strengths of XML::Twig is that it let you work with files that do not fit in memory (BTW storing an XML document in memory as a tree is quite memory-expensive, the expansion factor being often around 10).

To do this you can define handlers, that will be called once a specific element has been completely parsed. In these handlers you can access the element and process it as you see fit (...)

---

The code posted in the question isn't making use of the strength of XML::Twig at all (using the simplify method doesn't make it much better than XML::Simple).

What's missing from the code are the 'twig_handlers' or 'twig_roots', which essentially cause the parser to focus on relevant portions of the XML document memory-efficiently.

It's difficult to say without seeing the XML whether processing the document chunk-by-chunk or just selected parts is the way to go, but either one should solve this issue.

So the code should look something like the following (chunk-by-chunk demo):

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Twig;
use List::Util 'sum';   # To make life easier
use Data::Dump 'dump';  # To see what's going on

my %bedrooms;           # Data structure to store the wanted info

my $xml = XML::Twig->new (
                          twig_roots => {
                                          DivisionHouseRoom => \&count_bedrooms,
                                        }
                         );

$xml->parsefile( 'divisionhouserooms-v3.xml');

sub count_bedrooms {

    my ( $twig, $element ) = @_;

    my @divParents = $element->children( 'Divisions' );
    my $id = $element->first_child_text( 'HouseCode' );

    for my $divParent ( @divParents ) {
        my @divisions = $divParent->children( 'Division' );
        my $total = sum map { $_->text } @divisions;
        $bedrooms{$id} = $total;
    }

    $element->purge;   # Free up memory
}

dump \%bedrooms;