Performance change from 1.7.3 to 1.8 (and 1.8.2)

["Mccomb, Joseph D" <jo...@merck.com>]

Greetings,
Recently I upgraded my xml development boxes from cocoon 1.7.3 to 1.8. Then
I received complaints from my developers that cocoon was slower in the
initial rendering of pages than it had been in 1.7.3. I set up two identical
environments, except for the version of cocoon, and had our loadtester test
the response time from cocoon on identical xml sites (with multiple pages).

The environments are:
OS: Redhat Linux 6.2
Java version: 1.2.2
Servlet Environment: Tomcat 3.1.1
Environment #1 has Cocoon 1.7.3
Environment #2 has Cocoon 1.8

Tested over multiple pages, cocoon 1.7.3 rendered an average of 3.5 times
faster than cocoon 1.8.
When 1.8.2 was released, I installed it and obtained similar results. 

Has anyone else observed this ? Does anyone have any configuration
suggestions on improving rendering with versions 1.8 and greater ? 

Sincerely,
Joseph McComb