You're welcome Kevin - please let us know what your findings are! 

Cheers,
<prs/>

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Rodgers [mailto:kevin.rodgers@xxxxxxx] 
Sent: Jueves, 20 de Enero de 2005 12:09 p.m.
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  optimization for very large, flat documents

Thanks to everyone who responded.  For now I plan to follow Pieter's idea of
chunking the data into manageable pieces (16-64 MB).  Then I'm going to look
into Michael's suggestions about STX (unfortunately, not yet a W3C
recommendation and thus not widely implemented) and XQuery.

For anyone interested in some numbers, I've split each of my 2 large files
(613 MB and 656 MB) into subfiles of 16 K independent entries (which vary in
size), yielding sets of 25 and 37 subfiles (of approx. 25 MB and 17 MB each,
respectively).  I process them by running Saxon 8.2 from the command line
(with an -Xmx value of 8 times the file size) on a Sun UltraSPARC with 2 GB
of real memory.  The set of 37 17 MB XML subfiles are processed with a
slightly simpler stylesheet, and take about 1:15 (minutes:seconds) each; the
set of 25 25 MB XML subfiles use
1 document() call per entry to/from a servlet on a different host and take
about 8 minutes each.

My next step is to use Saxon's profiling features to find out where I can
improve my stylesheet's performance.

Thanks again to everyone on xsl-list for all your help!
--
Kevin Rodgers