In an earlier post I compared a .Net and Scala implementation of an iTunes Music Library XML parser. The Scala version took a long time to 'load the XML file from disk'. Since then I realized that the default behavior of the parsers is to validate the Schema. I had disabled this behavior in the .Net version but not the Scala/Java version. Much of the 3 seconds to 'load' the XML is really an external HTTP request to download the xsd file and perform the validation. However, using the Scala library I do not see an easy way to disable the Schema validation (Under the covers the Scala library is delegating to existing Java APIs).