Dennis Sosnoski has published benchmarks of various XML document object model APIs for Java, including DOM, dom4j, JDOM and Electric.

The DOM implementations tested were Apache Crimson (originally Sun's XML parser) and Apache Xerces (derived from IBM's XML parser.)

The benchmarks include tests for:

• Document construction time
• Tree walk time
• Text generation time
• Serialization time (to serialized Java object)
• Deserialization time (from serialized Java object)
• Document memory usage
• Serialized size (size of serialized form of Java object

Full results are available from Sosnoski's web site. In general, Apache Xerces seems to yield some of the best results.