> I tested your new stylesheet on the following "fiendish" board, and it
> performs almost 5 times better than the previous one:
>
> <board>
>   <row>0,0,0,0,0,5,0,0,0</row>
>   <row>0,0,0,0,2,0,9,0,0</row>
>   <row>0,8,4,9,0,0,7,0,0</row>
>   <row>2,0,0,0,9,0,4,0,0</row>
>   <row>0,3,0,6,0,2,0,8,0</row>
>   <row>0,0,7,0,3,0,0,0,6</row>
>   <row>0,0,2,0,0,9,8,1,0</row>
>   <row>0,0,6,0,4,0,0,0,0</row>
>   <row>0,0,0,5,0,0,0,0,0</row>
> </board>
>
> The results:
>
>   AW1                                AW2
> =============================
>
> 113016    14.8MB        24407    35MB
>
>
> My results on this board are:
>
>    6688    10MB

Hi Demitre,

I ran the fiendish board with both stylesheets and have different
results to you!

I have:

AW1     AW2     DN
52.5      10.7      15.75
50.5      10.3      15.81
49.5      10.5      15.9

The tests were run using SaxonB 8.7 from the command line with the -3
option to run the transform 3 times.

One difference to note is that my stylesheet is a "standalone"
stylesheet which needs the -it switch, whereas yours is the more
traditional one which uses an input XML.  I doubt this is that
significant but Saxon does produce different output for the two types
when using the -t switch (no memory info for standalone).

Either way, when using the "fiendish" board you've provided, I place
mine at just over 50% faster than yours at the moment :)