So what exactly is the memory limit for XSLT transformations?
I know that Michale Kay in his book mentions that documents
larger than 1 or 2 MB cannot be processed by an XSLT
processor, because, as you say, the processor loads them into memory.
However, why his this limit so low? On my box I have 256 MB
of memory. It is not uncommon for a new machine to have 500
MB of memory--or even double that amount.
It seem that if you have 256 MB of memory, you ought to be
able to handle a document of around 50 MB. (I think the
processor actually requires something like 4 times the size
of the document--or was it 10?)
Using Saxon, I have successfully processed 20Mb documents on a 128Mb
machine, and I have heard of people processing 100Mb documents on a 1Gb
machine. You need to learn how to tune the Java VM memory settings, of
course.
Michael Kay
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list