<sect1 id="performance">

<sect1info>

<abstract role="texinfo-node">

  <para>Discussion on conversion speed</para>

</abstract>

</sect1info>

<title>Performance analysis</title>

<indexterm><primary>speed</primary></indexterm>

<indexterm><primary>performance</primary></indexterm>

<indexterm><primary>optimize</primary></indexterm>

<indexterm><primary>efficiency</primary></indexterm>

<para>

The performance of docbook2X,

and most other DocBook tools<footnote>

<para>with the notable exception of the 

<ulink url="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/docbook-to-man">docbook-to-man tool</ulink>

based on the <command>instant</command> stream processor

(but this tool has many correctness problems)

</para>

</footnote>

can be summed up in a short phrase:

<emphasis>they are slow</emphasis>.

</para>

<para>

On a modern computer producing only a few man pages

at a time, 

with the right software — namely, libxslt as the XSLT processor —

the DocBook tools are fast enough.

But their slowness becomes a hindrance for

generating hundreds or even thousands of man pages

at a time.

</para>

<para>

The author of docbook2X encounters this problem

whenever he tries to do automated tests of the docbook2X package.

Presented below are some actual benchmarks, and possible approaches

 to efficient DocBook  to man pages conversion.

</para>

  <title>docbook2X running times on 2157 

<sgmltag class="element">refentry</sgmltag> documents</title>

  <tgroup cols="3" rowsep="1" colsep="1">

      <row>

        <entry>Step</entry>

        <entry>Time for all pages</entry>

        <entry>Avg. time per page</entry>

      </row>

      <row>

        <entry>DocBook to Man-XML</entry>

        <entry>519.61 s</entry>

        <entry>0.24 s</entry>

      </row>

      <row>

        <entry>Man-XML to man-pages</entry>

        <entry>383.04 s</entry>

        <entry>0.18 s</entry>

      </row>

      <row>

        <entry>roff character mapping</entry>

        <entry>6.72 s</entry>

        <entry>0.0031 s</entry>

      </row>

      <row>

        <entry>Total</entry>

        <entry>909.37 s</entry>

        <entry>0.42 s</entry>

      </row>

  </tgroup>

<para>

The above benchmark was run on 2157 documents 

coming from the <ulink url="http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/">doclifter</ulink> man-page-to-DocBook conversion tool.  The man pages

come from the section 1 man pages installed in the 

author’s Linux system.

The XML files total 44.484 MiB, and on average are 20.6KiB long. 

</para>

<para>

The results were obtained using the test script in 

<filename>test/mass/test.pl</filename>,

using the default man-page conversion options.

The test script employs the obvious optimizations, 

such as only loading once the XSLT processor, the 

man-pages stylesheet, &db2x_manxml; and &utf8trans;.

</para>

<para>

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be obvious ways

that the performance can be improved, short of re-implementing the

tranformation program in a tight programming language such as C.

</para>

<para>

Some notes on possible bottlenecks:

<itemizedlist>

  <listitem>

    <para>

      Character mapping by &utf8trans; is very fast compared to 

      the other stages of the transformation.  Even loading &utf8trans;

      separately for each document only doubles the running time

      of the character mapping stage.

    </para>

  </listitem>

  <listitem>

    <para>

      Even though the XSLT processor is written in C,

      XSLT processing is still comparatively slow.

      It takes double the time of the Perl script<footnote>

<para>

From preliminary estimates, the Pure-XSLT solution takes only 

slightly longer at this stage: .22 s per page</para></footnote>

      &db2x_manxml;,

      even though the XSLT portion and the Perl portion

      are processing documents of around the same size<footnote>

<para>Of course, conceptually, DocBook processing is more complicated.

So these timings also give us an estimate of the cost

of DocBook’s complexity: twice the cost over a simpler document type,

which is actually not too bad.</para></footnote>

      (DocBook <sgmltag class="element">refentry</sgmltag>

       documents and Man-XML documents).  

    </para>

    <para>

      In fact, profiling the stylesheets shows that a significant

      amount of time is spent on the localization templates,

      in particular the complex XPath navigation used there.

      An obvious optimization is to use XSLT keys for the same

      functionality.  

    </para>

    <para>

      However, when that is implemented,

      the author found that the time used for 

      <emphasis>setting up keys</emphasis> dwarfs the time savings

      from avoiding the complex XPath navigation.  It adds an

      extra 10s to the processing time for the 2157 documents.

      Upon closer examination of the libxslt source code,

      XSLT keys are seen to be implemented rather inefficiently:

      <emphasis>each</emphasis> key pattern <replaceable>x</replaceable>

      causes the entire input document to be traversed once

      by evaluating the XPath <literal>//<replaceable>x</replaceable></literal>!

    </para>

  </listitem>

  <listitem>

    <para>

      Perhaps a C-based XSLT processor written

      with the best performance in mind (libxslt is not particularly

      the most efficiently coded) may be able to achieve

      better conversion times, without losing all the nice

      advantages of XSLT-based tranformation.

      Or failing that, one can look into efficient, stream-based

      transformations (<ulink url="http://stx.sourceforge.net/">STX</ulink>).

    </para>

  </listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</para>

</sect1>