[Config] XML Parsing Serious Issues

Hello List, once again, I ran into some serious problems using the Config-Package for parsing XML-Files. We are running a webserver with a system seup as follows: Pentium 1GhZ, 1GB RAM, Suse 7.3, PHP 4.3.4 Php.ini: memory_limit(1GB) max_execution_tim(10000) etc. etc. We have to parse huge XML-Files and I decided to use the Config (latest release). Here's what happens: We load a 10 MB big XML-File into the Root-Object (parseConfig('Yadayada', 'XML')), which takes a while. Using "top" under the console we can see that the http-process uses up to 180MB memory - then the process quits with the result that I get either error-output in the browser (see below) or a message "page cannot be displayed". Errors are kind of "cannot use a scalar value in Config.php line 152+153" and sometimes it tells me "overloading of a string not allowed" (have to testrun it again to get the exact error-message). Anyway, I assume that there is a general problem with parsing huge XML-Files (recursion?) in PHP, isn't there? Or is there a chance that using another PEAR-Class (XML_Tree?) may be better for parsing huge XML-Files? Any ideas, any experience made with parsing huige XML-Files? TIA Thorsten