Re: Is failed key-lookups very slow in Xalan-J 1.2?

["(Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen)" <tra@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Jeni Tennison <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [Nov 22. 2000 14:21]:

> Just to alleviate a misunderstanding: using an xsl:for-each around the
> call to the key function doesn't change the scope of the key function
> unless the xsl:for-each selects nodes in a different document.  The
> key function *always* looks throughout the entire document for nodes
> matching its 'match' pattern.

Thanks.  You were right in assuming that I had misunderstood this.

I have had reports from others on the Xalan list that say that they
experience similar behaviour, so hopefully I can get an answer whether
this is a bug in Xalan (which I have a strong suspicion of) or not.

I revised my code very similar to yours in order to avoid the lookup if
I can - based on the value of ACCESSCODE - but when we use this in a
broader sense I cannot do so.  Thanks anyway for the suggestion.  



> I would have thought that narrowing the scope of the key will only
> decrease the time involved if there are VALUENUMs that you're not
> interested in at all.  If that's the case, then its best to filter
> them out using the key's 'match' pattern.  For example, if there are
> VALUENUMs in table0 that you are interested in *and* VALUENUMs in
> the table1 that you're never interested in, then you could change the
> match patten to:
> 
> <xsl:key name="price-for"
>          match="table0/record0/VALUENUM"
>          use="../PRICEKEY"/>

This might be a good suggestion.  I will try it out if the Xalan people
do not respond.

> The other thing is that it's always possible that this is a Xalan bug
> - make sure you have the latest version and see whether the Xalan
> support team can help at all - or a problem to do with the version of
> the Java virtual machine that you're using - as Mike reported
> yesterday, Sun's JDK 1.3 can sometimes be a lot faster than
> Microsoft's JVM.

I am developing with Visual Age for Java (which has a rather slow Java
implementation) and benchmarking with Tomcat running with JDK-1.3 from
Sun so unfortunately there isn't much to get there.

Thanks for your very elaborate reply!
-- 
  Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen                   "...sound of... Tubular Bells!"
  http://bigfoot.com/~thunderbear


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