Selenium performance in converting an HTML table into a .NET DataTable - performance

Question

Using Selenium with VB.NET using the ChromeDriver. I am using XPath to get a collection of TR nodes and then iterating through each row to get the TD data.
Source looks like this
<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1">
<tbody>
<tr bgcolor="#E7E7BD">
<td class="content">RUSSIA</td>
<td class="content">ABCD</td>
<td class="content">13-APR-18</td>
<td class="content">26-APR-18</td>
<td class="content"> 01234567</td>
<td class="content"/>
<td class="content"/>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#E7E7BD">
<td class="content">ZURICH</td>
<td class="content">XYZS</td>
<td class="content">09-NOV-18</td>
<td class="content"/>
<td class="content"> 98765432</td>
<td class="content">Z</td>
<td class="content">DAA</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
I use this to get the rows which works well and returns some 9500 rows:
Dim trNodes As IReadOnlyCollection(Of IWebElement) = driver.FindElements(By.XPath("//tbody/tr[preceding-sibling::tr/td/a/#name='MAIN' and following-sibling::tr/td/a/#name='APPX']"))
Then I iterate through each HTML row and add it to a .NET DataTable
For Each elem As IWebElement In trNodes
'get the cells in the row (ie the TD elements in the TR element)
Dim webCells As IReadOnlyCollection(Of IWebElement) = elem.FindElements(By.XPath("td"))
'create a new DataRow and add data
Dim row As DataRow = dt.NewRow
'now cycle through all the fields and add them to the DataRow
For i As Integer = 0 To webCells.Count - 1
row(i + 1) = webCells(i).Text
Next i
'add the DataRow to the DataTable
dt.Rows.Add(row)
Next elem
Currently it is working as designed BUT it takes a very long time to process. 9500 rows with 7 fields is taking about an hour and a half to insert into a DataTable. Is this expected performance? Is there something I can do to speed up performance?

Answer 1

From what I have gathered, Selenium is great at automation but parsing HTML is not a strong suit. So for the node parsing I am using HTML Agility Pack and that does it in under 5 minutes.