Saxon

This test case for XSLT shows a significant difference in performance for different Saxon versions

so I thought it might be of interest. On Saxon 9.5.1.2 the test runs 90 time faster than for Saxon 9.3.1.1.

I just ran the XSLT from the command line (in Windows 8) as follows:

java -cp "J:\SaxonPE9-4-0-9J\saxon9pe.jar" net.sf.saxon.Transform -t -xsl:xquery2xml.xsl -s:input-file1.xml -o:output/result.xml

Performance results are summarised below:

Version:                Time (ms)
SaxonPE9-3-0-11J        1899939
SaxonPE9-4-0-9J         2857
SaxonPE9-5-1-2J         2106

This is a non-typical test case in that the XSLT stylesheet functions as a lexer for XQuery code.

The input is initially processed as a sequence of unicode codepoints, but a lengthy regular

expression is used later to tokenize text that is not within XQuery comments or string-literals.

There's also a lot of tail-recursion going on.