Yea, we tried that, as Nicster said, "... it's making the server cry". lol
The idea was to have one grand XML feed for all the characters on the account using the same key the private character listings use... I have like 3 characters up on CIT right now (Q&A reasons) and even that took a bit to load.
We'll figure something out... I'm thinking along the lines of JSON, it's way more lightweight and any OOP language can decode it, including PHP parse.