Todd Huss » XML http://gabrito.com Anecdotes on Technology Leadership, Ruby, Java, Scala, Cloud Computing, Open-Source, SEO, and Design Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:21:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Xalan XSL transformations in the 1.4 JDK can be VERY slow http://gabrito.com/post/xalan-xsl-transformations-in-the-14-jdk-can-be-very-slow http://gabrito.com/post/xalan-xsl-transformations-in-the-14-jdk-can-be-very-slow#comments Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:30:13 +0000 Todd Huss http://gabrito.com/post/xalan-xsl-transformations-in-the-14-jdk-can-be-very-slow Continue reading →]]> At work as part of our XML data feed product we end up doing XSLT transformations on XML files starting a a few MB all the way up to several hundred MB. Using the 1.4.2 JDK it took over 4 days to do the XSL transformation on the largest file so over lunch one day we started brainstorming our troubleshooting approach. When we tried it on the 1.5 JDK the same transformation took a couple of minutes as opposed to 4 days. Talk about an improvement!

However, I was thrown astray of the solution because we include a specific version of Xalan in the classpath so I assumed it was the JDK version that was the differentiator but when I ran it by Naresh he reminded me that Xalan is included in the JDK.

If you’re using JAXP on a 1.5 JDK (where Xalan is now under com.sun.org.apache) or a 1.4 JDK (where Xalan is under org.apache) then the only way to override the version of Xalan is to put it before rt.jar in the bootclasspath. Sure enough, there appears to be some issue with Xalan in the 1.4.2 JDK where large XSL transformations are extremely slow!

Here’s what it looks like to get Java to use your own version of Xalan:

java -Xbootclasspath:xalan-2.X.X.jar:$JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/rt.jar …

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