[xsl] Re: Question of performance

[mhkay at iclway dot co dot uk]

>As the variable is declared in the top of the template, is >this declaration processed each time (I think that it >must) and would the code be faster, though less >maintainable, if I declare this (static) variable globally?

It's very hard to predict what optimizations an XSLT processor is going to do. Saxon, for example, will treat a variable whose expansion has no dependency on the source document as a constant, whether it is declared locally or globally, so there should be very little run-time overhead either way. But a result tree fragment is always built at run-time.

Your only real way of finding out is to measure it. My guess is that the differences are going to be tiny, and if you're looking for performance improvements, you should look elsewhere. For example, can you avoid that recursive call, or reduce the number of recursive calls?

Mike Kay 

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