hours to process chunks

[Tim Arnold <jtim.arnold@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I have several files to process to html. All books are processed fine
except for one.

It is valid DocBook 5, validated with xmllint and oNVDL using the
relaxng specs.

It is 14mb and is taking about 12 hours to convert, using the standard
chunking stylesheet. I have a similar book that is 15mb that takes
only 32 minutes. I thought maybe it was the number of olinks or pis,
so I made a copy of the file with those removed (still valid) and it
made no difference in processing time. Here's the last command I
tried:

xsltproc --maxdepth 4000 \
             --timing \
             --stringparam target.database.document olinkdb.xml \
             --stringparam current.docid qcug \
              /root/xml/docbook/xsl-1.76.1/html/docbook.xsl nopis_nolinks.xml

Parsing stylesheet /AppDocs/xml/docbook/xsl-1.76.1/html/docbook.xsl took 7 ms
Parsing document nopis_nolinks.xml took 977 ms

then a list of files being written. The speed of these log lines
displaying on the terminal goes in fits and starts. Sometimes about
one file a second, other times it just sits there for minutes before
another file is written out.

I'm running on a dedicated server: freebsd, no other processes
running, with 12gig ram; the disk is not thrashing.

What factors make processing go so slowly. It must not be as simple as
filesize or olinks.

thanks for any insights,
--Tim Arnold