Does the XMLDocument.Load(System.IO.Stream) method load the whole

  • Thread starter Thread starter Shawn Sesna
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Shawn Sesna

The description of the XMLDocument.Load method doesn't quite answer the
question. When passing in a FileStream object to the Load method, does it
load the entire document into memory? For example, if I have a 1 gigabyte
file, would the Load method attempt read the entire 1 gigabyte file into
memory when using a FileStream object?
 
Shawn said:
The description of the XMLDocument.Load method doesn't quite answer the
question. When passing in a FileStream object to the Load method, does it
load the entire document into memory?
Click to expand...

Yes. The kind of stream doesn't matter, actually, it will pull data from the
stream until it's read a complete document.
For example, if I have a 1 gigabyte file, would the Load method attempt
read the entire 1 gigabyte file into memory when using a FileStream
object?
Click to expand...

It wouldn't actually read all of the file into memory, it would read it
piecewise and construct an in-memory representation of the XML document it
represents while it's doing so. This will end up quite a bit larger than 1
GB, actually. This is why XmlDocument is unsuitable for very large streams.
XmlReader and XPathNavigator are light-weight alternatives.
 
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