Using String classes will get you extremely slow performance, as they're
not designed to be used that way.  Without looking at your code I don't
know for sure, but I would suspect you're doing alot of String
concatenations etc, which you should use a StringBuffer for instead. 
Using String objects will definetely get you in trouble
performance-wise.

Server side Java should be plenty fast for pretty much anything, I
recently ported some very CPU intensive code over to Java from optimized
C++ and Java turned out about twice as slow, which isn't bad.

-Nic  (who's a Java gearhead but an XSL weenie)

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:
> Java makes it very easy to write well designed, clean, elegant and horribly
> inefficient code. For example, my experience from writing a very simple HTML
> "text extractor" in Java is that unbelievable amounts of CPU are spent
> handling (GC-ing) string objects. We started with parsing <20K/sec and moved
> up to >1M/sec, just by using our own "ReuseStr" class instead of Java's
> built-in "String" class. I therefore wouldn't be surprised to see a ~x10
> improvement in Java based XSL processors once attention is focused on
> performance. Of course I'm not actually writing one so that's just a
> speculation.


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