Java start up on Saxon makes it massivly slower to run

Hmm, have you not tried to process the large nested XML file? I found the Java-Startup very slow, too, but afterwards saxon runs fine. You can always create a new outputfile from saxon by using something like

<xsl:template match="page">
    <saxon:assign name="ofile">
      <xsl:value-of select="@outputfile" />
    </saxon:assign>
    <saxon:output file="{$ofile}"
      method="html" indent="yes" 
      doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
      doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401"
      encoding="iso-8859-1">
      <!-- ... process contents here -->
</xsl:template>
[download]

and so on. This assumes you defined a saxon variable. And you should have a look at the correct syntax when you're using newer Saxon versions. This syntax is a snippet I use with Saxon 5.5.1 which is from a time when the official W3C XSLT did not support multiple outputfiles.

I build my whole site from one large XML (about 200k) file and it processes in some 10 seconds on a Athlon 1.4 512MB linux box - including the java startup.

Yes I know that this is not a perlish solution. Maybe you should look at http://www.javajunkies.org/?

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion