I'm pulling some RSS feeds into a datastore in App Engine to serve up to an iPhone app. I use cron to schedule updating the RSS every x minutes. Each task only parses one RSS feed (which has 15-20 items). I frequently get warnings about high CPU usage in the App Engine dashboard, so I'm looking for ways to optimise my code.

Currently, I use minidom (since it's already there on App Engine), but I suspect it's not very efficient!

Here's the code:

 dom = minidom.parseString(urlfetch.fetch(url).content)
    if dom:
        items = []
        for node in dom.getElementsByTagName('item'):
            item = RssItem(
                key_name = self.getText(node.getElementsByTagName('guid')[0].childNodes),
                title = self.getText(node.getElementsByTagName('title')[0].childNodes),
                description = self.getText(node.getElementsByTagName('description')[0].childNodes),
                modified = datetime.now(),
                link = self.getText(node.getElementsByTagName('link')[0].childNodes),
                categories = [self.getText(category.childNodes) for category in node.getElementsByTagName('category')]
            );
            items.append(item);
        db.put(items);

def getText(self, nodelist):
    rc = ''
    for node in nodelist:
        if node.nodeType == node.TEXT_NODE:
            rc = rc + node.data
    return rc

There isn't much going on, but the scripts often take 2-6 seconds CPU time, which seems a bit excessive for looping through 20ish items and reading a few attributes.

What can I do to make this faster? Is there anything particularly bad in the above code, or should I change to another way of parsing? Are there are any libraries (that work on App Engine) that would be better, or would I be better parsing the RSS myself?