1
Aside from other suggestions which make sense, one simple thing to try is to use Aalto-xml parser from:
https://github.com/FasterXML/aalto-xml
it implements Stax API (as well as Stax2 extension, SAX); and as long as you do not need full DTD handling (which I suspect you don't) has the feature set you need.
For common read use cases I think it can be 30-40% ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
