Benchmarking Xalan

[Geert Poels <ge...@Lant.be>]

hello,

This mail is meant for the developers of the Xalan package, Java version.

We are writing an application which reads and processes an XML file to read our data from.
Used quite a lot in our code are the XPath api's from Xalan.  (mostly used class : XPathAPI )

Recently we've upgraded to a more recent release of Xalan (being some 2.2 developer release ) and noticed an alarming DEcrease of the processing speed.
We noticed this because one of our developers had an astonishing advantage over everybody else.
Using the quickest distribution, our app can parse this document in 8 seconds, no matter which development machine we use.  
(ranging from Celeron 600 tot PIII 1Gz).  Switching to a 2.2 development version, this suddenly jumps to a minute to a minute and a half.

To verify this out, I automated parts of our application and tried some combinations of Xerces releases with Xalan releases.
Here are my results (milliseconds) :


---------  Test using  xalan:21 xerces:114 .  Done in : 14110
---------  Test using  xalan:D6 xerces:114 .  Done in : 63625
---------  Test using  xalan:D8 xerces:114 .  Done in : 61656
---------  Test using  xalan:D9 xerces:114 .  Done in : 62141
---------  Test using  xalan:D10 xerces:114 .  Done in : 62516
---------  Test using  xalan:D11 xerces:114 .  Done in : 63110

---------  Test using  xalan:21 xerces:20beta3 .  Done in : 12360
---------  Test using  xalan:D6 xerces:20beta3 .  Done in : 64968
---------  Test using  xalan:D8 xerces:20beta3 .  Done in : 61968
---------  Test using  xalan:D9 xerces:20beta3 .  Done in : 62859
---------  Test using  xalan:D10 xerces:20beta3 .  Done in : 61250
---------  Test using  xalan:D11 xerces:20beta3 .  Done in : 64453

So the fastest seems to be Xalan2.1 with the latest Xerces.
Remarkable are the huge differences in speed between 2.1 and 2.2Dx.

BTW : Is there a way I can identify a Xalan or Xerces version ?  Which class(-member) is holding a release number ?
Is this number detailed enough to cover beta-versions as well ?

thanks,

Geert