Slow publishing times on Umbraco sites and the Umbraco SiteMapProvider

When publishing large amounts of content within Umbraco, I've noticed that the publishing process could easily time out, and I was wondering what was causing it. I found out that the UmbracoSiteMapProvider was the cause of the problem, and I gather that a sitemap was being constructed in the background, and subsequent errors and warnings were being left in the log. This was using up vital publishing time. To fix this, I commented this out of my web.config: My suspicions of its uselessness in general use were confirmed by this comment from the Umbraco issues log. If you're using an older version of Umbraco where this hasn't been done, feel free to comment it out and see your publishing times for large amounts of content reduce considerably!