Diagram below shows the CPU overhead of various common tasks. (Notice the parsing level is low here—the main hit when parsing is memory utilization.) Notice the impact of security operations. This can be helped somewhat with hardware-assisted acceleration, but the cost-benefit of hardware acceleration boards is often debated. Also note that abusing these security features to consume CPU resources is one way of mounting attacks.
Message sizes is often another major stumbling block for Java-based software systems processing XML. In modern day real-world systems, we are now seeing huge SOAP messages on the order of hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size. The conundrum is how to process these, given constraints on maximum JVM heap sizes in many platforms. Due to aggressive built-in streaming and compression, appliances can handle messages larger than their actual memory space.
Thys Michels Blog 