The Microsoft Pattern and Practices folks have produced an excellent guide to Improving
.NET Application Performance and Scalability with a chapter on Improving
XML Performance. If you build .NET Framework applications that utilize
XML then you owe it to yourself to take a look at the guidelines in that document.
There is also a handy, easily printable XML
Performance checklist which can be used as a quick way to check that your
application is doing the right thing with regards to getting the best performance
for XML applications.
On a similar note, Mark Fussell has posted XmlNameTable:
The Shiftstick of System.Xml and XmlNameTable
Revisited which provide some tips about how to use the XmlNameTable class
to improve processing speed by up to 10% when processing XML documents.