[xsl] for-each performance question

[Josh Proctor <daslight110@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have a question concerning performance (or maybe best practice):

I am using cocoon 2.10, Xalan 2.7.0, and XSLT 1.

My xml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<School>

        <Student>

                <Profile>

                        <LastName>Joe</LastName>

                        <FirstName>Smith</FirstName>

                        <Middle>L</Middle>

                        

                </Profile>

        </Student>

        

</School>

There are about 20 elements under profile, and only 1 student under
HighSchoolAdmin.

I need to display all the profile information for the student. This
should be very simple but I want to make sure it is as efficient as
possible, as we could have a very large number of people hitting the
system at once. The xml is not large but the number of users who will
be looking at this within a small time frame is very large.

What would be best (or is there a better way):

Case 1:

A for-each "loop" which drills down to the parent node of the xml I
want to display.

        <xsl:template match="/">

                <xsl:for-each select="School/Student/Profile">

                        <p>Last Name: <xsl:value-of select="LastName"/></p>

                        <p>First Name: <xsl:value-of select="FirstName"/></p>

                        <p>Middle Name: <xsl:value-of select="Middle"/></p>

                        ...

                </xsl:for-each>

        </xsl:template>

Case 2:

Applying a template which drills down to the parent node of the xml I
want to display.

        <xsl:template match="/">

                <xsl:apply-templates select="School/Student/Profile"/>

        </xsl:template>



        <xsl:template match="Profile">

                <p>Last Name: <xsl:value-of select="LastName"/></p>

                <p>First Name: <xsl:value-of select="FirstName"/></p>

                <p>Middle Name: <xsl:value-of select="Middle"/></p>

                ...

        </xsl:template>

Case 3:

A variable with a tree fragment of the xml I want to display.

        <xsl:template match="/">

                <xsl:variable name="studentProfile"
select="School/Student/Profile"/>

                <p>Last Name: <xsl:value-of
select="$studentProfile/LastName"/></p>

                <p>First Name: <xsl:value-of
select="$studentProfile/FirstName"/></p>

                <p>Middle Name: <xsl:value-of
select="$studentProfile/Middle"/></p>

                ...

        </xsl:template>

Case 4:

Use the XPath for each element I want to display.

        <xsl:template match="/">

                <p>Last Name: <xsl:value-of
select="School/Student/Profile/LastName"/></p>

                <p>First Name: <xsl:value-of
select="School/Student/Profile/FirstName"/></p>

                <p>Middle Name: <xsl:value-of
select="School/Student/Profile/Middle"/></p>

                ...

        </xsl:template>

Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.