Xalan-J performance w/ compiled stylesheets

[John Nolt <ba...@corp.earthlink.net>]

Hi,

I'm using Xalan 1.0.1 with JDK 1.2.2 on a Debian Linux machine, PII 300mhz with 256 megs of RAM.

When I use a compiled stylesheet (supposed to improve performance), Xalan seems to take much much longer to process an XML document from source to result tree. Not only is the elapsed time much longer, but it seems to take the same amount of time on the process where I compile the stylesheet (using -LXCOUT and -LXCIN).

Here are some result times I've gotten, using the Linux "time" function in front of the "java" command:

Xalan plain jane:
real    0m8.930s
user    0m8.430s
sys     0m0.370s

The time Xalan says it took:
   ========= Parsing file:/home/baghera/bar.xsl ==========
   Parse of file:/home/baghera/bar.xsl took 4569 milliseconds
   ========= Parsing foo.xml ==========
   Parse of foo.xml took 438 milliseconds
   =============================
   Transforming...
   transform took 342 milliseconds
   XSLProcessor: done

   The difference between "reported" and "real" time is 3.581 seconds. I imagine that most of the difference is overhead involved in starting the Java Runtime Environment.

Xalan w/ compiled XSL:
real    0m15.667s
user    0m12.830s
sys     0m2.610s

The time Xalan says it took:
   ========= Parsing foo.xml ==========
   Parse of foo.xml took 1090 milliseconds
   =============================
   Transforming...
   transform took 344 milliseconds
   XSLProcessor: done

   The difference between "reported" and "real" time is 14.233 seconds. 

Notice that it doesn't report that it's parsing the xsl doc. That's fine, and would be cool if I was seeing that much of an increase in speed (4 seconds would be great!), but I'm not. What's it *doing* for all that time?

Thanks for any info,

John Nolt
Technical Editor
EarthLink, Inc.