XML performance problems with xerces c++

I converted over a dictionary of words and definitions into XML files (one
file per letter of the alphabet), each weighing around 1-5 megs (I chose XML
over a DB for important reasons). I'm trying to parse these files and it's
taking an incredible amount of time to do it. When parsing small files
(letters X, Y, and Z - a total of 815 words or 151 KB) the parser can do so
in less than 2 seconds. When parsing the letter A file (40,000 some words or
1.58 megs), it takes 5 seconds just to parse 20 words. It seems the larger
the XML file, the longer it takes to parse individual nodes. Can anyone
suggest why this is happening and how I can fix it? I've used xerces c++
2.4.0 and recently upgraded to xerces 2.5.0.



I'm just following the standard XML start-up and DOM parsing procedure

- Initialize platform utils

- Don't validate files

- parse and assign DOM document

- go through each child node and collect data



I have a 1600MHz processor, so handling a few meg files should be fairly
quick.