IE 5.0 vs. XML-files

[xdavid () ARAGORN NATUR CUNI CZ (David Komanek)]

Hi all,

I'm just playing with XML around and have noticed strange behavior of MS
Internet Explorer 5.0 :

- if I let the MS IE display SMALL xml-file, everything seems to be O.K.

- if I let the MS IE display A BIT BIGGER xml-file, everything goes
wrong - IE is hard-working for a very long time (tens of minutes per
megabyte of data), consuming nearly all system resources and later in
time the system runs out of memory, MS IE crashes and doesn't release
the swapper allocated. I tried this with files validated by XML-Spy 2.5
(so I suppose these files should be O.K.). These files were approx. 1,2
- 1,6 MB of data - I suppose it's not too much, if XML should be used
for transparent data exchange .... it consumed 270 MB of swap, 128 MB of
physical memory and then crashed under circumstances I described above.
The parsing of these files took tens of minutes not downloading of data
(the program, which  generated the xml-file send it over the network in
about 1.5 second and reading of static file saved in the same disk from
which IE was started resulted in the same manner).

MS IE on all MS Windows 95 / NT / 2K is affected so I suppose this is
really bug inside MS IE and not in the virtual-memory-handling routines
(maybe I'm not right, but I don't think these routines are common to all
MS-Windows platforms.

If MS IE is designed to handle only small pieces of XML-data, it should
pop-up an alert window or whatelse to inform the user that the file is
too big and couldn't be parsed. Don't you think so ?

If this was already published before, my apologies.

With best regards,

  David Komanek