Joe, I agree that indexing in general is good thing and COULD improve performance , if it is really USED. Unformtunately current Apache XPath.exes impelementation almost does not do this - maybe this question more to org.apache.xpath.axes package, than to org.apache.xml.dtm.ref.
I run smoketest target in the xalan tests and have found following : method IndexNode has been called 31215 times method DTMDefaultBase has been called 1174 times I would say currenly index usage is very low in comparison to overhead it addes. The only iterator capable of using indexing (in package org.apache.xpath.axes) is org.apache.xpath.axes.DescendantIterator. (There is also class org.apache.xpath.axes.ChildTestIterator, where all code which could use indexing is commented out). My guess that DescendantIterator covers really few cases of traversing. So probably if experienced person could look into org.apache.xpath.axes package and implement using indexes in all classes this will improve xalan performance. Best regards, Pavel
