> I would think there's something in your code that makes the 
> performance quadratic (or worse) with respect to source 
> document size. This is nothing to do with XSLT, it's to do 
> with your own code. To test this theory, try plotting how the 
> stylesheet performance varies as you increase the document
> size: 1Mb, 2Mb, 4Mb, 8Mb.

As another test of this theory, try running an identity transform on the
same source document. The only difference between the identity transform and
your own stylesheet is your code: so if the identity transform runs 1000
times faster, it's your code you need to look at.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/