Re: performance benefits of XSL3.0

SAX is a very low-level way of streaming XML; XSLT 3.0 is a very high-level
way of doing it. The main benefit of using a high-level approach to anything
is not machine performance, but programmer productivity: you get a correct
program running with a fraction of the effort. Another factor is whether the
high-level software is smarter than the programmer writing the low-level code.
That depends on the skills of the programmer: a few programmers will do a
brilliant job, but most will probably make a mess of it. For example, it's a
reasonable to assume that Saxon's multi-threading is more likely to bug-free
than multi-threading code written by the average Java programmer; but I have
no idea whether your programmers are below or above average.

With any exercise looking at a possible course of action to improve
performance, you need to start with measurements and targets. What is your
current performance, how far does it fall short of requirements? Then you need
to understand where the current performance is going. You say that XSLT is
contributing to the large processing times, but do you know why? It could be
one inefficient XPath expression that could be rewritten to solve all your
problems. Sometimes all the cost is in stylesheet compilation, and there are
ways of dealing with that. If you don't know exactly where the bottlenecks are
currently, then any exercise designed to remove them has a good chance of
failing. It may be worth exploring alternative approaches experimentally just
to collect data, but treat it as an experiment: just another thing to measure
to improve your understanding.

Michael Kay
Saxonica


> On 19 Apr 2016, at 19:28, Mailing Lists Mail daktapaal@xxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Dear All,
> Need some quick help.
> We are in a business of processing xmls and these come in big loads. some of
them running real big. We have application that needs to convert these
incoming XMLS into our internal XMLs and persist the data. We use XSLT as our
transformation layer. We are totally convinced we need XSLT to carry out our
job , obviously because of the ease of coding and the powerful language
constructs of xslt. Off late we have noticed that the XSLT has contributed
hugely to the large processing times.
>
> We are using Sax parsers to chop the big XMLs into meaning ful chuncks and
process each of these chunks in parallel .and we use XSLT2 and saxon to
process the individual chunks.
>
> My question here is, if I shift to XSLT3 and do not change my code, will it
still give me any performance benefits over the XSLT2 . I understand that the
XSLT3 has a slightly different approach to XSLT programming ( losing certain
axe etc.). Will the xslt3 processor read the input xml in a different way?
>
> I am hoping that my question is clear ..
>
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