XSLT processor performance

I have spent some time making a more rigorous set of XSLT performance
statistics, which are visible at
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~rahtz/xsltest/Report.html

I should say that I don't entirely believe some of what I did. I'll
repeat it tonight. The issue of file cacheing is a worry. Anyway, all
the files I used are on the web, if anyone with some patience wants to
try it, or test other processors. The file Test.pl is a (horrid) Perl
script that does the work.

Some trends are fairly obvious in this sort of `number-crunching'
XSLT:

 a) XT remains the fastest processor
 b) Saxon is the obvious best choice by almost any criterion other
    than raw speed
 c) Xalan does poorly when the file gets big
 d) Sablotron has pretty serious problems with large-scale tree traversal

On *my* computer setup, Oracle (with Sun JDK) and Sablotron are memory
hogs which effectively kill the machine while running on a
decent-sized file. I know Oracle can do much better if other setups.

None of this surprised me. My biggest disappointment was Sablotron,
which had impressed me earlier; the 'apply-templates select="//*'
really upset it!

I know these tests are not of much interest to the web servlet
brigade, but for those of us who want to run radical transforms on big
documents, it may help.

The next step must be to see what happens when different XML parsers
are used with each processor. 

Sebastian Rahtz



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