Monthly Archives: December 2001

More investigation of the slow processing speed for my document. It seems like the slowdown is somewhere in libxslt's chunking code. With chunking turned on, xsltproc took 4 minutes to process the document, while without chunking (ie. producing one large file), it only took 1:30 minutes (less than half the processing time). In comparison, using Jade to process the document took about 2 minutes with chunking turned on. With chunking turned off, it took 4 minutes. I wonder if this means that xsltproc's performance with chunking turned on can be improved to be faster than its nochunks performance? Either that, or the DSSSL stylesheets for Jade can be optimised for the non chunked case :-)

I was updating my documentation generator for pygtk (the one that tries to make the C reference docs for GTK look like docs for Python). It was taking a while to process with db2html (which uses Jade to convert from SGML to HTML), so I thought I would look at using DocBook/XML and DV's xsltproc, which I had heard ran a lot quicker. Unlike other people's experiences, the docs ended up taking over twice as long to process with xsltproc compared to jade! I suppose this was to do with the size (about 1.9MB of of XML source), and the number of cross references (the doc generation script added a lot of xrefs). On other docs I tried, xsltproc seemed noticably better. I also found out that White Christmas made with coco pops tastes pretty good.