does xdocument load the whole xml document

I am developing a webpage where I want to parse and XML snippet in a string. I am doing this via XDocument.Load method.

Dim doc As XDocument = XDocument.Load(New StringReader(strXML))

where strXML is the xml snippet.

What i want to know is - does the load method load the whole snippet in memory? If thats the case...my program would slow down considerably if there are 200-300 users logged in at the same time.

Would using XDocument.parse be a better option? How is it different from xdocument.load

I am not very keen on using XMLReader for the same.

Thanks a lot.