Now function a performance bottleneck

[Holger Knublauch]

Hi Andy, I ran a profiler through a typical scenario with our software and discovered that 10% of the clocked time was spent in the initialization of the xsd:dateTime literal needed by the afn:now() and NOW function. Below is a snapshot from Yourkit profiler. Unless this is a measurement error in the tool, I believe there would be a low-hanging fruit to optimize performance if the value would be computed on demand only. I do understand that you need to get the time stamp for the duration of the whole query, but I believe it would be much faster to simply get the current time millis as a long, and from this derive the actual XSD literal only if someone really calls this SPARQL method. Thanks Holger