I've been benchmarking XSL-powered applications quite a bit lately, and I've come up with a few tips which have helped improve the performance of my apps:
- Avoid "//" - it requires scanning the entire tree
- Cache the parsed style sheet, if possible
- Reduce the size of the XML document
- Use keys, parameters, and variables as necessary to avoid repeating the same lookups
I've heard people say that including / importing stylesheets can have an adverse affect on performance, but I haven't noticed. It may cause a performance impact if the style sheets are not cached, but I'm caching mine and it doesn't make a difference.
It goes without saying that any dynamically generated content can be optimized through caching, and XSL is no exception.