Interesting post by Dino Fancellu on SoftwareReality.com, XSLT is Way Faster Using Java 5, talks about how by replacing Xalan by XSLTC and Crimson by Xerces Sun JDK 5.0 (1.5.0_01) is 5.59 times faster than Sun JDK 1.4.2 when performing a simple transformation. JRockit 5, BEA’s own Java 5 compatible JVM, does it even 7.88 times faster!
And it’s free, so it may be worth a look?
For a fair comparison, you should run Hotspot 5.0 vs JRockit 5.0. Sun has improved a bit since their 1.4.2 version, although they are still behind us. And yes, JRockit is so far available only on Windows and Linux on Intel (IA32, EM64T/AMD64, Itanium). But keep watching the news…
Henrik, JRockit Team
This is only true for people who did not care choosing their parsers and xslt-Processors themselves (which is made so easy by the java plugable provider mechanism). We’ve been using Piccolo for parsing most of the time (well I know two bugs, I knew more in Xerces before I stopped using it) and Saxon or JDxslt for Transformation. All those were free for years and so much faster than the crap they built into the JDK. Guess they are now equally fast or so.
Ah, that’s good to know! thanx
JRockit is only faster on Intel platforms. On other it will miserably fail. (Not available for 🙂