Saxon he 9.4 performance -xslt - performance

Question

I have following two templates in xslt :
<xsl:template name="calculateAbsoluteEntryNodeIndex">
<!-- current 'entry' node -->
<xsl:param name="entryNode"/>
<!-- current 'entry' node index (position) in xml tree-->
<xsl:param name="entryNodePosition"/>
<xsl:choose>
<!--if the current 'entry' node contains 'namest' attribute then its ('namest') value is treated as
the absolute index (of the current 'entry' node)-->
<xsl:when test="$entryNode/#namest">
<!--writing result-->
<xsl:value-of select="number($entryNode/#namest)"/>
<xsl:text>;</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="number($entryNode/#nameend)"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<!--getting last 'Nameend' attribute value-->
<xsl:variable name="lastNameEndValue">
<xsl:choose>
<!--check if exists any 'entry' node before the current 'entry' node (on the current 'row' level) having 'nameend' attribute defined
('entry' has to have index number less than $entryNodePosition) -->
<xsl:when test="$entryNode/preceding-sibling::entry[#nameend]">
<!--get 'named' attribute value of the last matched "entry" node and convert it to number -->
<xsl:value-of select="number(($entryNode/preceding-sibling::entry/#nameend)[last()])"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="0"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:variable>
<!--getting 'entry' node index of the matched 'Nameend' attribute -->
<xsl:variable name="lastNameendNodePosition">
<xsl:choose>
<!-- if lastNameEndValue != 0 -->
<xsl:when test="$lastNameEndValue != '0'">
<!-- calculate index of the 'entry' node matched in $lastNameEndValue selection =>it is done by counting all preceding siblings of the node matched in
$lastNameEndValue increased by 1-->
<xsl:value-of select="count(($entryNode/preceding-sibling::entry[#nameend])[last()]/preceding-sibling::entry) + 1"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="0"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:variable>
<!--writing result-->
<xsl:value-of select="$entryNodePosition - $lastNameendNodePosition + $lastNameEndValue"/>
<xsl:text>;</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="$entryNodePosition - $lastNameendNodePosition + $lastNameEndValue"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
And
I runned some profiling that goes with saxon he 9.4.-TP:profile.html
template calculateAbsoluteEntryNodeIndex 25268028
Total time spent on this template is 174966.587ms.
Whole xslts is executing in Total time: 337196.696 milliseconds.
It seems that is having a problems with transfomration of big tables around 14 thousands lines of xml. Any idea what can be issue here.
Structure of table is.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<table tabledef="excel">
<tgroup cols="1">
<colspec colname="1" colnum="1" colwidth="100%"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry morerows="1">
<p>
Text
</p>
</entry>
</thead>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry align="left">
<p>1</p>
</entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>

Answer 1

There's not really enough information here: for example, what's the typical number of sibling entry elements within a row? And how often is this template executed? I guess you are probably executing it once per entry, and it is obviously quadratic in the number of entries.
The repetition of the expression $entryNode/preceding-sibling::entry[#nameend] is obviously wasteful.
It's very hard to offer advice on whether there are other ways of writing this that would go faster, without knowing anything about what the code is actually doing. Perhaps using xsl:number for some of the counting would work better; it's very difficult to tell. Alternatively, instead of doing a "for-each" that processes each entry independently, consider doing sibling recursion that works forwards through the nodes, passing parameter information about nodes already processed so you don't have to search backwards to preceding-sibling nodes.