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

[Uche Ogbuji]

Dieter Maurer wrote:
> 
> 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).

I did specifically mention working with cDomlette.  Is that what you
were using?

> 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 ....

cDomlette takes up about half the memory as pDomlette.  In some cases
(since it uses string pooling) this might be more or less the
proportion.

When I checked with the 3MB cemetary demo, 4XSLT+cDom 0.11a2 took up
42MB and Saxon 6.0.2 took up 33MB of RAM.

>  > ....
>  > 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.

0.11 was released yesterday.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python