RE: A simple question

Subject: RE: A simple question
From: "Kevin Jones" <kjouk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 14:19:41 +0100
> 
> > > Using which processor?
> > 
> > Does not really matter, I think.
> 
> And this is also the answer. For high-traffic 
> website the speed of particular XSLT engine 
> does not matter, because saving milliseconds 
> when you are wasting seconds - does not 
> matter. 

I think one of the issues here is about how cacheable
the site pages are. The problem I found was that
caching non-customised pages is relatively straight
forward. The difficulty starts when you are serving pages
that are different for each site user or groups of users.
On a lot of sites you are going to get pages made up 
from fragments, each fragment having its own freshness
criteria. In these cases the performance of XSLT
can become an issue. This can be magnified where each
fragment is created from an individual transform.

It is of course equally important to deal with performance
issues linking to any database or business logic you
might be using. These can clearly kill you as well. If 
you have a quick backend then the caching/processor speed is
likely to be more of an issue than if you don't. But if
your backend is slow it doesn't really matter how you
put the front-end together its always going to be
slow.

> 
> > Have you any experience in XSLT in high-traffic 
> > (put 200hps) websites?
> 
> No. 
> 
> But I have used different XSLT engines and I did 
> some profiling ( Really. I did some profiling,
> using commercial Java profiler "Jprobe" or something). 
> Also I understand what are the bottlenecks of XSLT 
> and bottlenecks of 200 hps websites.  
> Also I know how to make 200 hps website powered 
> by XSLT. And this has  nothing to do with the 
> XSLT engine I'll have to use.
> 
> Rgds.Paul.
> 
> PS. Actually, this monday ( tomorrow ) I'll be discussing 
> exactly those issues with some world-known 
> website which gets more than 200 hps. And they are 
> shooting for XSL. So maybe after a couple of weeks 
> I'll answer "yes" to your question.  At the moment - 
> no, sorry, I can not claim I already did that. Will be 
> interesting to see somebody who already did.  
> 

I did build a totally XSLT site that ran at about 80hps. 
This was done with Saxon/Servlets on fairly large Compaq 
Alpha. The bigger part of the software problem was in 
figuring out how to maximise the cache hits while avoid 
serving stale data. It was made much more complex by having
a potentially enormous user base each with personalised 
home pages.

Regards,
Kev.

_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


Current Thread