>If a lot of cross-referencing of the input document is occuring,
>then the process can increase super-linearly, that is to say, 
exponentially or >factorially.

Note that there isn't much in XSLT or XPath, per se, which scales worse 
than linearly -- but there are many ways to write a path or stylesheet 
which does. Also, of course, if you're processing something large enough 
to drive your system into heavy swapping to disk you can expect to see a 
knee in the curve.

So I'm still inclined to agree that this is most likely an inefficient 
stylesheet. It may well be one that _can't_ be written efficiently; 
convolving multiple lists against each other is sometimes necessary and 
always expensive... but it might be a good idea to look at one of the 
websites which suggest ways of improving stylesheet efficiency, and see 
whether any of those tips apply to what you're trying to do.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

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