Effeciency of passing XML tree object as function arguments

[sandeepvl]

Hi all, 

Is it efficient to pass an object returned by lxml.etree.parse("a.xml") as argument to other functions? Is the object returned a C pointer-like mechanism referring to the in-memory tree representation of XML? Or is it something else? Will it cause any performance issues down the line? I expect the size of the tree when taken in-memory could be around 15 MB. 

I am planning to write multiple functions to process each child node and its sub-child nodes. To each function. I will be passing the object corresponding to child node. 

Thanks
Sandeep