I happen to notice that the new XML Reader is almost twice as slow as the deprecated one. Whilst notes like the Recursive Loop substantially increased increased their execution speed this one seems to become unreasonable slow:
Can you confirm the version of KNIME and platform you are using?
Also, is it possible to share your workflow?
We prefer not to receive customer data, but if the data is publicly available, or you can provide more details on the size, depth of hierarchy, etc…it would help to understand where this slowness may be occurring, and if there are steps to mitigate this issue.