> Using Saxon PE from inside Oxygen, I transformed 20 times for each.
> Here is the average time as reported by Oxygen:
> 
> 1) Exact selection: 4.1s
> 2) Wildcard selection: 5.0s
> 
> That is a difference. But it is also fair to say that for 
> most transformations, on a small dataset, it will be 
> impossible to measure a difference of any importance.
> 

Does your transformation time include document parsing/building time? For a
small task like this, the parsing time will completely swamp the
transformation time. If the parsing time is 4.0s, then your figure shows the
transformation time is different by a factor of 10.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay