XT vs Xalan performance

[John Ward - XML Core Development <Jo...@ireland.sun.com>]

Hi,

I have been running some performance comparisons between James Clarks XT and the 
latest Xalan-J 1.1 download from apache. I compared the timings of the two XSLT 
transformation engines using various stylesheets of increasing size to do some 
simple transformations of one of Jon Bosak's Shakespeare XML files eg 
formatting, numbering, hyperlinking etc. The XSL files used in the test were 
from a Mulberry Technologies XSLT training course which I participated in.

There was a significant performance difference between the two. The results are 
summarized in the file attached. 

1. Are these performance differences to be expected?

2. Are there any areas known in the Xalan code which could require some tuning 
to improve the performance which we could actively investigate?

3. Could the download Xalan and Xerces jars be built with debug on and if so 
would this have the same impact on performance of the java version as would be 
expected if debug information was included in the c++ version?

Regards

John Ward