Speed of processing man pages

Hello *!

I would like to know if anyone is particularly interested in fast
DocBook-to-man-pages conversion. I've came across the problem of slow
processing when running
the automated tests for docbook2X.
Let's just say, the performance results are fairly disappointing,
and it isn't obvious how the situation could be improved short of
rewriting everything in C.

I'll make a full write-up of the results in the next bugfix release
(coming soon),
but here are my preliminary results, if anyone is interested.

The goal is to process from 1000 to 10000 typical refentry documents as quickly
as possible. (In my case, these documents come from using Eric S.
Raymond's doclifter
on all the man pages installed on my system.)

XSLT processor is libxslt
Man-XML translator is the Perl-based one

To convert 187 pages:

xsltproc takes approx 41 seconds
db2x_manxml takes approx 26.5 seconds without charset conversion
(Haven't tested with charset conversion yet, however it does seem to
be much faster
than the first two stages.)

This is with obvious optimizations such as only loading the XSLT stylesheet once
for the 187 documents, and also loading db2x_manxml once only.

So about .36 seconds to process one page.
Or one hour to process 10000 pages. :-(

It would also be helpful to have some comparison with other
DocBook-to-man solutions.
Anyone like to do these? No coding required!

--
Steve Cheng
鄭君博        http://gold-saucer.afraid.org


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