Low CPU load on the other users generally means they're in an I/O wait. If they're waiting on a shared resource such as network/disk, this could indicate non-CPU hardware loads that would mpact performance of other tasks.
Beyond that... I'd be guessing. The easiest way to get a _good_ answer would be to run a serious performance analyser on the each of the two platforms, find out where the code is spending its time, and try to determine from that what specific low-level operations are performing better or worse.... then think about whether that's due to the JVM, the operating system... or whether something in one of those is causing Xalan/Xerces/other Java code to perform differently, though I think that last is least likely ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research
