Subject:Stylus Studio slow processing Formatting Objects Author:Howard Ungar Date:22 May 2002 04:06 PM
When I process a file using the built-in xslt processor it runs very slowly (about 90 seconds). The same file runs in less than a second when run from the command line with saxon. Note that saxon runs equally slowly when run from within studio as an external processor.
I have not seen these performance problems before beginning to use formatting objects so I'm assuming that this is why it is so slow.
Subject:Re: Stylus Studio slow processing Formatting Objects Author:Minollo I. Date:22 May 2002 04:09 PM
Are you sure that the slow part is XSLT processing and not FOP
post-processing? Have you chosen to post-process the result of your XSLT
processing with FOP?
That would explain why even Saxon is slower; Stylus Studio would first run
Saxon and then FOP to convert the resulting FO XML into PDF to render it.
So, Saxon is amazingly fast, while our built-in processor is in line with
Xalan-J; I couldn't try MSXML as you are using a Java extension function.
Anyway, the Stylus Studio built-in processor is not engineered with
performance as its main goal; it's main task is to allow debugging and
backmapping.
Version 4.0 of Stylus Studio also supports Xalan-J based debugging. In the
next few months we will also roll-out MSXML- and Saxon-based debugging;
that will let you choose the processor that best suites your needs.
Subject:Re: Stylus Studio slow processing Formatting Objects Author:Howard Ungar Date:22 May 2002 05:05 PM
Minollo,
Thanks for the feedback. Did you try running Saxon as a "custom processor" within studio to replicate the slowness there?
You can test the MS version by commenting out the one line which uses the extension function. I just tried it and it's just as fast as saxon.
As a side note, I switched from xalan-j to saxon when I found it to be extremely slow in processing a stylsheet with recursive templates. In that case the eXcelon built-in processor was very fast also. Can you recommend a way to post a message to the xalan-j group about these performance problems?
Subject:Re: Stylus Studio slow processing Formatting Objects Author:Minollo I. Date:22 May 2002 05:22 PM
At 05:17 PM 5/22/2002 -0400, stylus-studio-tech Listmanager wrote:
>From: "Howard Ungar"
>
>Minollo,
>Thanks for the feedback. Did you try running Saxon as a "custom
>processor" within studio to replicate the slowness there?
Oh, right, sorry; I forgot mentioning that.
Yes, I run it inside Stylus Studio.
The problem is with your custom command line:
java net.sf.saxon.Transform %1 %2
It should really be:
java net.sf.saxon.Transform -o %3 %1 %2
Otherwise the output is sent to stdout, and the long pause you see is
caused by an unexpected very long stdout result.
>You can test the MS version by commenting out the one line which uses the
>extension function. I just tried it and it's just as fast as saxon.
That doesn't surprise me; MSXML is usually very very fast.
>As a side note, I switched from xalan-j to saxon when I found it to be
>extremely slow in processing a stylsheet with recursive templates. In
>that case the eXcelon built-in processor was very fast also. Can you
>recommend a way to post a message to the xalan-j group about these
>performance problems?
You can try: xalan-dev@xml.apache.org; it's a majordomo mailing list.
About our own internal processor, we are profiling the application using
your testcase to understand what's going on there; hopefully this will
bring to an improvement in our performances.
Subject:Re: Stylus Studio slow processing Formatting Objects Author:Minollo I. Date:23 May 2002 02:45 PM
You'll probably be happy to know that thanks to your testcase we have found
a couple of major bottlenecks in our processor (mostly in the output
handler), and we have worked on them.
On my machine now Stylus Studio 4.0 processes your testcase in about 800
msecs. This improvement will be part of 4.0 when it will be released. We
will also back-port the fixes to 3.1, and we will make available an
improved 3.1 version in a few days.