XSLT and memory usage

["Martin Sevigny" <sevigny@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear XSLT experts,

I'm processing a 25Kb XML file (a textual document) with a 50Kb XSLT stylesheet. The stylesheet does a lot of reordering and has around 20 top-level variables and parameters.

Tranforming this XML document with this XSLT stylesheet works, but takes around 30Mb to 40Mb of memory. I've tried with both Xerces and Saxon, and memory usage is about the same. This is done in a servlet environment, using Java2/JSDK2.0/Apache JServ 1.1/Apache 1.3.9 on Windows NT 4.0, in case it matters.

Trying the same stylesheet with Xalan, Saxon and XT from the command line, it is even worse, taking more than 100Mb of memory with Saxon and Xalan, XT being more performant with "only" 60Mb.

Obviously, processing my stylesheet requires a lot of memory, so I would like to know the general guidelines about memory usage and XSLT stylesheets.

Are there any recommendations for making the transformations as efficient as possible?

Thank's for any info,

Martin Sévigny
sevigny@xxxxxxxxx


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