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Re: [xsl] Max size?

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>If I were to generate very large XML files (upwards of 1 Meg?),
>would I encounter problems when processing with
>XSLT, considering that I would want to sort on various elements.

Since XSLT permits random access to the document's content, most XSLT 
processors require that the entire source document be in memory at once. 
Depending on your machine's available space for stack and swapper, this 
may or may not impose limitations on the maximum size document you can 
handle, and depending on the XSLT processor architecture there may be 
other limitations.

Obviously, sorting involves additional tables, which also consume storage.

Early versions of Xalan had some hardcoded limits on maximum document 
size; those limits should no longer exist in current releases. Xalan can 
also be set into an "incremental" mode in which the source document is 
lazily loaded; that imposes some overhead, but if your stylesheet doesn't 
read all the way to the end fo the document, this may yield a perfomance 
gain.

(There has been some discussion of recognizing stylesheets which don't 
require holding everything in memory at once and handling them differently 
than the general case. I haven't heard any reports of this sort of 
optimization being successfully implemented. Xalan has brainstormed 
several possible solutions but we haven't had time to experiment with 
them; that's one of the things we're hoping to investigate this year.)

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Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research


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