Re: [xsl] Managing debug logging in complex transforms: what do people do?

Subject: Re: [xsl] Managing debug logging in complex transforms: what do people do?
From: Graydon <graydon@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 18:02:52 -0400
On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 08:50:33PM +0000, Andrew Welch scripsit:
> On 24 March 2014 20:28, Graydon <graydon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[oXygen debugger very useful]
> > That is all true and it's wonderful when it's practically available.
> >
> > My experience is that it simply takes too long to be useful with "real"
> > (that is, the multi-thousand-template, here's a several tens of MB of
> > input document, horrid conversion stylesheets I was most recently
> > dealing with) input.  Two orders of magnitude slower than non-debug
> > execution, and a definitive answer to "but where did it die?" could be
> > had by other, if more effortful, means.
> 
> I also have the pleasure of debugging other people's 10,000+ line
> spidery mess of call templates, and I've never had an issue with
> speed...  I'm guessing the transform you were working already took a
> long time?

Single digit integer minutes, quite often, outside debug mode.

Many many fairly deep path matches in the template matches;
SECTION/SECTEXT/PARA and SECTION/PARA are entirely different things in
the input SGML markup and must be handled differently, multiplied by
lots, plus a massive exercise in grouping to meet the new XML
mixed-content handling standards.  Combined with the large input files,
I suspect it just made the debugger start swapping and any time I've
ever had an XSLT process start doing that with Saxon-J it gets very
slow.

-- Graydon

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