That must be quite a system. When you say "subsequent
parsing with XSL"
I guess you're not doing a lot of work in the stylesheet?
We have a CMS with (in this case) over 5000 assets... Typical parsing
involves creating navigation, building photo gallery's and displaying
content from a single stylesheet with about 5 included stylesheets to do
specific tasks (navigation etc).
We had a lot of performance issues using //asset[(_at_)id=$var] to reference
individual assets but supplying the entire path to the target group
/content/assets/group[(_at_)name='news']//asset[(_at_)id=$var] improved things
a lot
(with help from this lists archive :) ).
We now cache entire pages for this client as they have experienced periods
of EXTREME load where page render times can grow to over 5 sec...
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list