60x? That sounds just right.

I came across a recent blog in which the author benchmarks the performance of evaluating XPath using VTD-XML on a 20 MB and comparing it to JAXP. The result is a convincing 60X. Surprised? Don't be. The fact is that DOM and JAXP just have too much inherent issues (performance, memory usage etc). Below is the link to that blog

http://fahdshariff.blogspot.com/2010/08/faster-xpaths-with-vtd-xml.html

link