The cElementTree module is a C implementation of the ElementTree API, optimized for fast parsing and low memory use. On typical documents, cElementTree is 15-20 times faster than the Python version of ElementTree, and uses 2-5 times less memory. On modern hardware, that means that documents in the 50-100 megabyte range can be manipulated in memory, and that documents in the 0-1 megabyte range load in zero time (0.0 seconds). This allows you to drastically simplify many kinds of XML applications.