> > > > that Michale Kay in his book mentions that documents larger
> > > than 1 or
> > > > 2 MB cannot be processed by an XSLT processor, because, as you 
> > > > say,
> > > > the processor loads them into memory.
> > > 
> > > Did he really say that?  That would surprise me, because that
> > > limit seems rather low.
> > 
> > It would surprise me too, but anything is possible.
> > 
> > Michael Kay
> 
> I thought I was mistaken. But here is the quote:
> 
> "One caveat about data conversion applications: today's XSLT 
> processors all rely on holding the data in memory while the 
> transformation is taking place. The tree structure in memory 
> cann be as much as ten times the original data size, so in 
> practice, the limit on data size for an XSLT conversion is a 
> few megabytes. Even at this size, a complex conversion can be 
> quite time-consuming, it depends very much on the processing 
> that you actually want to do."(p. 45. Kay, Michael, *XSLT 2nd 
> edition. Programmer's Reference*: Arden House, Birmingham, 
> Acock's Green, Canada, Wrox Press, 2001.)

You may have read "a few" as meaning "1 or 2", but that's not what I
wrote. I was suggesting the heuristic "if you've got a 64Mb machine
don't try to process more than about 6Mb of source data."

Machines have got bigger in the last couple of years, and XSLT
processors have become more efficient, so the limits have increased. But
600Mb is still way beyond what's sensible to attempt.

Michael Kay


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