Question

Is there a way not to load the whole feed but only the first 10 <item></item> tag?

$feed = 'rss file';
$xml = simplexml_load_file($feed); //not the entire feed though

Answer 1

No. A DOM parser (such as SimpleXML) can only load the entire document.

But you can use XPath to filter the relevant parts:

$xml   = simplexml_load_file($feed);
$top10 = $xml->xpath('/rss/channel/item[position() <= 10]');

foreach($top10 as $item) {
   // output $item;
}