Re: How expensive is //?

But suppose you have a hypothetical root Records with one Record and
100,000 children directly under it. I was wondering if doing
Records/Record/child versus //child would make any difference.

Theoretically speaking, // will generally be slower than explicit path
specification, as the XSLT processor has to search the whole tree. But
realistically speaking, it also depends, what data structure is used
to represent the tree, and what algorithms are used to traverse the
tree.

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Regards,
Mukul Gandhi