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Re: Which is less expensive group by or select distin

Subject: Re: Which is less expensive group by or select distinct-values
From: "Dan Vint dvint@xxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:44:16 -0000
Re:  Which is less expensive group by or select  distin
At 02:14 PM 7/15/2016, Michael Kay mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
group-by and distinct-values are both going to have fairly similar time and memory characteristics, but of course the details depend on the specific processor.

But there are some very odd things going on in this code.

>
> <xsl:variable name="TermList">
> <xsl:value-of select="distinct-values(.//term[not(@keyref)])"
> separator=", " />

xsl:variable with an xsl:value-of child always has a bad smell. Why are you constructing an XML tree fragment when all you want is a string? In 99% of cases it should be <xsl:variable name="x" select="y"/>.


>>>The separator attribute caused that nesting. The values returned might have spaces, but not commas, so that was being used to break up the results to sort them.



More important, why are the distinct values being concatenated into a single comma-separated string, only to be tokenized again immediately afterwards?

> </xsl:variable>
> <data type="topicreport" name="WDTermList">
>  <xsl:for-each select="tokenize(normalize-space($TermList), ', ')">
>       <xsl:sort select="." />
>       <xsl:value-of select="."/>
>         <xsl:if test="position() != last()">, </xsl:if>
>   </xsl:for-each>
> </data>

And then turned back into a comma-separated string again, this time in sorted order.
>
> If this hadn't existed in the stylesheet already, I would have probably
> done something like:
>
> <xsl:for-each-group select=".//term[not(@keyref)])" group-by=".">
> <xsl:sort select="current-grouping-key()" />
> <xsl:value-of select="current-grouping-key()"/>
> <xsl:if test="position() != last()">, </xsl:if>
> </xsl:for-each-group>


That's certainly a lot better, assuming the comma-separation of the sorted list is actually wanted. Personally, I would write:

<xsl:for-each select="distinct-values(.//term[not(@keyref)])">
  <xsl:sort select="."/>
  <xsl:if test="position() ne 1">, </xsl:if>
  <xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:for-each>

Note that putting a comma before every item except the first, rather than after every item except the last, is less likely to disrupt the processing pipeline by calling last() right at the beginning, and can therefore reduce memory usage. Saxon will usually handle either form OK, but you don't want to be over-reliant on the optimizer recognizing such coding patterns.


>>>Agreed



With distinct-values, the memory needed is for the set of distinct values. With for-each-group, it's much more likely that the memory requirement will be one entry for each distinct value, where the entry holds both the value, and the list of nodes having that value, which you don't need in this case.
>
> I don't think the above is my major time synch in this process but it is
> one class of things that I'm reporting. I think the real processing time
> issue is coming from a lot of string analysis/parsing that is occurring.
>
Indeed, the costs might not come from this part of the code at all.

>>>I've confirmed that this is at least where some of my memory problems are coming from. I need to do some more work to figure out what is actually going on. Typically each topic has 2-3 taxonomy values and we only have about 200 unique terms in the taxonomy. So worst case if things are running the way I think, there might be 12,000 uses that reduce down to less than 200 distinct values. There are two other statements like this looking at different elements with ths same sort of scope. If they are included, I cross the memory limit. When I had these in place and increased the memory the run time increased from 60 min to 300+ before failing.




Michael Kay
Saxonica


--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Danny Vint

Panoramic Photography
http://www.dvint.com

voice: 619-647-5780

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