title: XML Serialization is slow
body: <p>I've inherited a project where the application's data model is an XML document. The developers before me had created an object model based on this xml's schema, and then coded against the object model.</p>
  
  <p>After several years of maintenance, this application has gradually started to show its age. The team leader has said that the key reason behind this is due to the 'slowness' of xml serialization. I'm tempted to call BS on this, but many of the xml files we deal with are over 2MB in size, and keeping in mind the basics of what goes on behind the scenes with objects marked <code>[Serializable]</code>, 2MB is a lot to reflect over so there might be some truth to the slowness theory.</p>
  
  <p>In your experience, is serialization really so 'slow'/bad as to opt for an XML -> XPath model instead of a XML -> POCO model?</p>
  
  <p>BTW this is a .NET 2.0 project, and our clients <em>might</em> be upgrading to .NET 3.5 sometime late next year.</p>