[xslt] efficiency

["Michael Rothwell" <rothwell holly-springs nc us>]

I'm applying a 24k stylesheet to a 96k xml file. It takes about two seconds
on a P3-700, with very high CPU usage.

It seems like the apply-stylesheet time does not grow linearly with the size
of the input -- it grows much more rapidly.

I would like to be able to process the XML in a smaller amount of time,
because the reponsiveness of the web server (which is doing the transforms)
suffers quite dramatically. I'm not sure how to achieve this, though.
Smaller input is not really an option. Are there some general optimization
strategies for stylesheets processed by liibxslt? Some known slow
constructs? Gotchas?

Thanks,

-M