Many concurrent users of site using XPathDocument and XslTransform objects efficiently?

[Guest]

Hi all, I've just finished writing a website using aspx pages (with VB behind) and it seems

to be working adequately, except that I anticipate that it will become fairly slow as the

number of concurrent users (up to possible 1000) start using it - no surprise. However, now

my job is to try to ensure the efficiency of the code before it is deployed

The foundation of the entire site is the use of XMl files that are being formatted using

XSL

Likely the greatest cost (in terms of processing) is reading the XML files into memory (the

XSL files are VERY small compared to the XML files so I'm not as worried about reading them

in). Some of the XML files are a few megabytes large and if they are getting loaded by

hundreds of different users, that is likely going to not only use a significant amount of

memory, but it is also going to have the code loading the same file multiple times

I was thinking about using the Singleton pattern to encapsulate a XPathDocument, but noticed

this on the Microsoft site concerning the XPathDocument
"Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any

instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

Now I suppose that I could wrap the entire class in a class that extends XPathDocument and

ensure the synchronization of each of the instance functions, but then the bottleneck would

be accessing the methods of the XPathDocument object

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make this site more efficient? Are there

commonly used design patterns when using the objects of type
XPathDocumen
XslTransfor

Specifically when using XPathDocument's
constructor with a String paramete
CreateNavigator Functio

AND specifically when using XslTransform's
- default constructo
- Load Function with String paramete
- One of the following forms of the Transform Sub
- Overloads Public Sub Transform(IXPathNavigable, XsltArgumentList, Stream, XmlResolver
- Overloads Public Sub Transform(IXPathNavigable, XsltArgumentList, TextWriter,

XmlResolver
- Overloads Public Sub Transform(IXPathNavigable, XsltArgumentList, XmlWriter,

XmlResolver
- There are 3 additional overloads, only difference is IXPathNavigable is XPathNavigabl

The above procedures belonging to each of the two classes are the majority of the

functionality that my site is providing (the workhorse of the site if you will). There are

some other bits of functionality that I've provided, but of much less consequence

Thanks
Novic

PS Is any one of the three Transform Sub's any more efficient than any of the others? I've

experimented with all three and noticed no functional difference - i.e.

1
Dim xmlWriter As XmlTextWriter = New XmlTextWriter(Response.OutputStream,

System.Text.Encoding.UTF8
xslTransform.Transform(doc, arguments, xmlWriter, Nothing

2
Dim writer As System.IO.StreamWriter = New StreamWriter(Response.OutputStream
xslTransform.Transform(doc, arguments, writer, Nothing

3
xslTransform.Transform(doc, arguments, Response.OutputStream, Nothing

 

[bruce barker]

actually loading the doc is pretty quick, but xsl processing is very slow
and computer intensive. you would be better off caching the xslt results,
rather then caching the xml input docs.

i'd save the output to disk. then use a filewatacher event (in case a change
to a processed xml file was made) to invalid the cache. to keep things
simple i'd invlidate the cache at app startup. i'd keep an in memory data
structure of mappings to handle rebuilds and concurrency issues.


-- bruce