firstInDocumentOrder() computed a document-order key even for a zero- or
one-node set. The key walks a node up to the root, taking its index among each
parent's children, which is a linear scan of a wide parent. string(@x) and
value-of take the string-value of a (usually single) node-set through this
path, so an XSLT transform over a wide flat fan-out rescanned the wide parent
once per extraction, turning the transform quadratic.
For a set of zero or one node the document order is irrelevant: the node is
trivially first. Return it directly without computing the key, the same
count <= 1 early-out sortedByDocumentOrder() already has.
A transform reading a couple of attributes and child values per element over a
20k-element document drops from ~2.3s to ~0.65s (~3.5x). The output is
unchanged: the full suite, the Apache Xalan XSLT gold-output corpus, the W3C
XPath/XSLT/EXSLT tests, and the WASM build stay green, and FirstInDocumentOrderTests
pins the single-node fast path and the multi-node document-first selection.
Mihaela Mihaljevic
9032d61950