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Java - XML Parsing Performance implementing JAXB on Large Files

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xml jaxb performance Java

I'm working on a personal project and I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock... I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm experiencing important performance optimization while parsing large XML files using JAXB in Java 11. My XML files can exceed 100 MB and contain deeply nested elements. When I attempt to unmarshal these files, the process takes an excessive amount of time and occasionally results in `java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space`. I have tried increasing the heap size using `-Xmx2048m`, but it still takes several minutes to complete, and in some cases, it fails altogether. Here's the code snippet I'm using to unmarshal the XML: ```java import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext; import javax.xml.bind.JAXBException; import javax.xml.bind.Unmarshaller; import java.io.File; public class XmlParser { public MyRootObject parseXML(File xmlFile) throws JAXBException { JAXBContext jaxbContext = JAXBContext.newInstance(MyRootObject.class); Unmarshaller unmarshaller = jaxbContext.createUnmarshaller(); return (MyRootObject) unmarshaller.unmarshal(xmlFile); } } ``` I also considered using a streaming approach with StAX, but I’m unsure how to implement it effectively without losing the benefits that JAXB provides. Is there a best practice for handling large XML files with JAXB, or should I switch to a different parsing method? Any guidelines on how to optimize performance would be greatly appreciated. For context: I'm using Java on Ubuntu. My team is using Java for this REST API. Any examples would be super helpful.