[xslt] tail-recursive memory consumption problems?

[Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai <asmodai in-nomine org>]

I am acting as proxy for trying to pin-point this problem, so please excuse
some of my vagueness.

On the DocBook IRC channel someone called attention to the bugreport at
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1661177&group_id=21935&atid=373747

This problem report involves a file
http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/ss/tmp/fvwm.1.xml which gets transformed using
a simple call of 'xsltproc /path/to/docbook-xsl/manpages/docbook.xsl
fvwm.1.xml'.

The original submitter of this report has some older versions of libxml and
libxslt, but I tested it with my versions and also went up to way over 218 MB
before I had to kill off the process since this gateway box has only 384 MB.

My versions:

Using libxml 20627, libxslt 10120 and libexslt 813
xsltproc was compiled against libxml 20627, libxslt 10120 and libexslt 813
libxslt 10120 was compiled against libxml 20627
libexslt 813 was compiled against libxml 20627

Norm Walsh provided another version of apply-string-subst-map to see if it
solved the problem, but it didn't. This is the replacement code:

<xsl:template name="apply-string-subst-map">
  <xsl:param name="content"/>
  <xsl:param name="map.contents"/>

  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="$map.contents">
      <xsl:call-template name="apply-string-subst-map">
        <xsl:with-param name="content">
          <xsl:call-template name="string.subst">
            <xsl:with-param name="string" select="$content"/>
            <xsl:with-param name="target" select="$map.contents[1]/@oldstring"/>
            <xsl:with-param name="replacement" select="$map.contents[1]/@newstring"/>
          </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:with-param>
        <xsl:with-param name="map.contents" select="$map.contents[position() &gt; 1]"/>
      </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
      <xsl:value-of select="$content"/>
    </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template> 

Could it be that libxslt is not efficient with tail-recursive operations?

Thanks for any ideas/suggestions/hints,

(Please feel free to post in that sourceforge tracker as well)

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/
About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you
for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like
you at all.