I'm not entirely sure that this is the place for such a discussion (performance of XML parsers). Either way, the DOM extension should suffice for most uses, most of the time. My point was simply that parsing, storing and manipulating a document using the DOM extension has far, far more impact on the performance of a script than prepending an expression with @, or conversely that the factoring out the @-operator purely for performance reasons would be silly.

A much better reason for not using the @-operator would be to avoid silencing errors which you would actually want to see. For instance, you could write @$pDom->loadHMTL($szHtml); by accident and no error would be reported (should be Fatal Error: Call to undefined method DOMDocument::loadHMTL()) yet your script would not work as expected since the HTML string was never loaded into the DOM document.