[XML-SIG] Re: [4suite] A bit o' challenge

[Dieter Maurer]

Uche Ogbuji writes:
 > ...
 > Well, I know that one always does better in his own benchmarking, but I have 
 > been working with 4XSLT quite heavily in the time leading up to the 0.11 
 > release, and I'm having trouble crediting this impression.  4XSLT is to my 
 > observations (and measurements using the time command-line timer) a good 25% 
 > faster than Saxon and faster by an even greater proportion than Xalan for most 
 > small to medium tasks.
When I used 4XSLT for the last time, it was version 0.9.

I transformed a 240 kb DocBook/XML file into HTML using Norman Walsh's
DocBook stylesheets.

4XSLT needed about 50 MB memory and about 30 min CPU time (slow
Pentium 100 MHZ with 64 MB main memory).

A colleague of mine used Saxon for his DocBook/XML documentation,
also with Normal Walsh's stylesheets. Runtime was in the order
of a minute. I should say, it was a very different machine (Sun E450
with 256MB memory).
But nevertheless, I expect that after normalization Saxon
was several times faster than 4XSLT.

I was especially horrified by the high memory requirements.
The mentioned document is one out of eight chapters of a book.
In the final production, the complete book must be processed
together (to get correct links, table of contents, indexes,...).
I fear, I would need 200 MB memory and several hours of processing
time ....

 > ....
 > So here's the bit o' challenge.  I'm looking for regular-sized, real-world 
 > transforms in which Saxon or Xalan smoke 4XSLT.  If you have such test cases, 
 > and can reliably reproduce 4XSLT's lassitude using cDomlette, please send it 
 > my way so I can have a look (and maybe find the performance bugs that I'm too 
 > close to see).
I will give it a try, when 0.11 is released and report back.



Dieter